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Comment by vhold | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side was getting busy signals because of there not being enough capacity somewhere between you and the person you were calling, and also cross-talk issues, where you could hear other peoples' phone conversations on your line.

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Absolutely. But the natural, two-ways, un-echoed flow of conversation, just as if you were talking to someone in the room - we have lost that, and it's a major loss.

Agreed, heck, I still lament low latency dial-up shell access. Even at 9600 baud it was still more responsive and felt like using a computer in the same room. Chatting with somebody like that, in talk/ytalk/etc, where you could see their every keystroke was a totally different experience because you could even get a vague sense of their thinking process through their pauses and edits.

I was using a 9600 baud connection about an hour ago. It sucks rocks. You can see the ascii-menu updating. Everything flickers. (Serial console access to a server, if you really care.)

If you run ytalk on a modern machine, it doesn't flicker, but you can still get every keystroke, because that's the protocol.

I have a server with ntalk for a few friends and it is my favorite method of non face-to-face communication.

For me it's the slurring compression artifacts as much as the lag that makes cell phone conversations, web meetings, etc. inferior. Local digital cell phone calls mimic the old cross-country long distance analog calls of yesterday in terms of delay.

w.r.t broadcast video, the eye/mind can still pick out an image from a static-filled snowy image, but digital artifacts from low/poor signal result in freeze-frames and garbled mess.

Summary: Digital. When it's good, it's very good. But when it's bad, it's awful.

This is it exactly. Calls though the landline failed rather more gracefully.

I still get the busy signal calling into the Seattle area from the Midwest once every 4-5 months or so when it's clear the other end wasn't on the phone. I'm not sure I got that before. So I wouldn't say the problem is solved, though the scale of communications has surely increased.

Cross-talk was an analog problem related to center frequency drift on muxed lines. As soon as phone companies put in ATM networks it went away.

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