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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

The sound of a modem handshake. The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up. A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings. Hum of a computer lab with the hollow of elevated floor under your feet. Those linen floppy sleeves. Using finger. Plan files. To each their own, obviously, but welcome to nostalgia.

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> The sound of a modem handshake

Apropos of nothing, but one of the stories I love to tell during interviews was the discovery that a 2,400bps modem was faster than the 56kbps one.

I was designing a "box" to read a group of switches and transfer that switch state information via modem to another "box" at the end of the phone line that replicated the switch on/off positions. During initial testing, I found out that with a 2400bps modem, my system could read the switches, dial the downstream modem and transfer the data and hang up before the 56k modems had even finished negotiating their speeds.

Latency often trumps bandwidth!

Something I had completely forgotten. I was writing a modem pool software server for a custom payment gateway back around 2004. Point of sale terminals would normally be configured for around 9600 baud for this reason. Payloads were typically small and link establishment was the priority.

Ha! I rewrote the CTOS serial protocol for the OS message passing link. It had been severely limited by fixed timers between polls, so going faster than 9600 didn't matter.

I changed it to 'if you have a packet, send it. If you can't buffer a packet, NACK it'. Now we could run full speed (and full duplex!) It instantly became practical to log in remotely and use source control on our server. Which mattered to me, because I was remote-working.

Anyway, nostalgia

Very neat. I recall in the dusty recesses of my mind various settings that you could pass to a modem at call initialisation to force certain speeds, modes, and other parameters. Did it have to be an actual 2400 baud modem or could you just "step down" the 56k for the same effect?

Usually yes, with an AT command: http://www.messagestick.net/modem/Hayes_Ch1-1.html

Knowledge of AT commands is still useful today, but the modems are cellular: https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/introduction-at-com...

Just finished a project last summer with a cell modem, actually. Felt weird using AT commands to make an http connection.

It was a one-off I built for a water utility in Connecticut. I'm pretty sure it was an embedded XECOM 2,400bps modem, but I don't remember how I figured out it was faster to do that than to use a 56.6k modem which I would have expected to be faster.

Since at 28.8k and higher the modems are negotiating more than just frequencies (phase shifts and bit compression are also negotiated, IIRC), telling a 56k to run at 2.4k should have the same effect.

(Leaving aside the obvious Usenet) Gopher. GIFs. Webpages hewn out of raw HTML by amateurs. The time before 56.6 modems were ubiquitous. Walking away while a webpage loaded. Everything text based (MUDs, IRC). University computers offering you power you could never afford at home. Leaving downloads running overnight. The wild diversity of non-Ethernet networks. Physical computer retail stores. ICQ. Self-hosted persistent gaming servers. Napster being new.

One thing that is better is that the university computers are xeon hpc clusters now and you can ssh to it from anywhere with anything.

Eventually, a grumpy old man* will show up and mention teletype and time-sharing. Someone else will incorrect him saying cloud computing is different. I'd love to hear Peter Norvig and Bill Gates talk it over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s

It's still nothing like today. I could connect to the cluster with my phone in a gas station bathroom if I wanted to. Imagine telling people from the 1970s the sheer amount of computational power I can trivially call up today over the course of a bowel movement on the side of the road.

I guess we're just going to gloss over how much of a terrible thing Novell Netware and Lotus Notes were to sysadmin :D

What you call terrible I called job security.

Oh, so many things were terrible, but it was definitely different. And quaint.

I remember seeing my first digital photograph (a blurry, dark scan of a wine bottle label) on the web and being mesmerized. Because before that, web images were exclusively computer art.

Gopher, MUDs and IRC are still alive.

I roam around Cybersphere at least daily or every two days.

The possibilities in a MUD are much wider than, for example, Cyberpunk 2077.

Hewn? As in shaped out of a piece of wood. Great word to use in this context, bravo.

It seemed apropos to the experience of writing HTML.

Development now is so smooth.

Then? Fire up your chainsaw.

>A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings

Really? Wow. I can't even ping internal AWS services (like the EC2 Metadata Service, NTP, or DNS). Nothing responds to ICMP Echo anymore, and it makes me sad. Lately it feels like `ping' has become useless

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

> Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Ping flood attacks. A lot of the early protocols have had to be discarded because they had all the privacy and security of a postcard.

Reading this just gave me the sensation of turning on the Apple Macintosh (or something similar) in the school computer lab and feeling the hair on my forearm stand on end from the static.

One time we stuck aluminum foil to the CRT screen and ran a wire off of it and zapped various objects and each other with the arcs.

And of course the BWONGGG of degausing.

Cathode ray tubes, what a hoot.

Finger, .plan and .project, talk, email, netnews... Unix was social media.

Tildes exist today with that premise. Bullshit free social collaboration and thinkering.

Life was simpler when you could stick hand coded HTML and some gifs in your ~/public_html folder and bingo, you had a web page.

Today I do that with ~/public_gopher in a Spanish language based punbix. Much easier to setup.

> The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up.

Nothing beats a good degaussing, ah...

I still use a CRT alongside a newer monitor. The CRT is 1600x1200@75Hz and still looks great. It definitely took time for flatscreen to catch up.

I am not nostalgic for CRTs. Not even remotely. I sat behind one for 20 years.

I have a laptop from the 90's that will still boot. I booted it up, poked around a bit, said "nahhh" and that was it.

Cats miss CRT's a lot more than we do

The whirl of a network cable bustling with traffic. https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...

No love for the internet Oracle? What else was one supposed to do late at night when they had a deeply meaningful question that just had to get answered?

There was always the option to send links to the Hampsterdance site to people that just started using Winamp to play music on their stereo.

"Di ba didi dou Didi didldildidldidl houdihoudi dey douDibidi ba didi dou dou" on high volume goes a long way in the middle of the night.

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