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I lived out several years of my youth at 1200 baud. The word "U.S. Robotics" was like porn to me.

In the early days, I had a Miracle Technology WS2000 with manual, rotary knobs to select speeds (all the way from 300 to 1200bps), plus a manual connect/disconnect knob, so making a connection consisted of dialing the BBS number, listening for the tones and putting the modem online.

Unfortunately, my modem had a sticky phone line relay and so to disconnect the call the procedure was: turn knob, listen for click, thump modem a couple of times just in case, lift phone and check for dial tone.

Pic here, although mine was an even earlier model with a brown case:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/86/...

Manual, rotary knobs remind me of phones with manual, rotary dials. They were everywhere through the entire 20th Century, but now there are plenty of people who've never seen them in their entire life, and of course youtube videos of kids being laughed at by their parents when they're forced to try to figure out how to use them. That's something else we didn't have back then: humiliating videos of ourselves -- recorded by our family, no less -- broadcast to the whole world. I don't blame the kids for failing, though. The dialing mechanism of such phones is clearly not very intuitive.

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