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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

What year was 300bps the state of the art? Around 1995-1996 I had a 14.4k modem and it was pretty fast at the time.

It wasn't the state of the art in the early to mid 1980s, but that's when they were still popular. The famous Supra Modem 2400 arrived on the shelves in the late 1980s. I had a 14k4 modem in 1994, and a 28k8 one in 1995.

Add.: the 14k4 modem cost me an equivalent of about $350 in 1994.

I was about to ask how much they cost but you’d already edited your post.

I remember hitting 48.8/56k in ~1996 after I got a modem for Christmas (aged 5).

Now I’m on 1000/50mbit, or ~17.5 thousand times faster than my first connection if my math is correct.

My first connection was 1200 bps, and now I have 2 Gb/s. That's over 1 million times faster.

Downloading a program for my Atari ST at maybe 500 kB in size took an hour. Now it would be difficult to even measure the time needed. It's difficult to explain just how slow downloading things used to be.

Not only was it expensive, but it was a crazy time to buy a modem. There was also 16.8k and 19.2k, which were proprietary if I recall correctly. (I had a 19.2k modem, and was overjoyed when I found a BBS that I could connect to at that speed.) Around that time you also had 28.8k and 33.6k, which I think were standardized by were incredibly short lived.

I remember sticking to what was effectively 14.4k until I jumped to cable internet. It did not make much sense to upgrade since ISP rates were lower for slower modems and serial modems were also more expensive. When I did jump to cable internet, I took some flak because of my obsolete computers. I was far happier with an always-on connection on an obsolete *ix box than dial-up on a faster PC (since I didn't have the money to have both at the time).

US Robotics 16.8k and 19.2k modems were the stuff of pirate boards mostly.

Or at least, many pirate boards only accepted those connections from other USR modems.

Could be. I ran into a number of BBSes that dropped subtle hints that they hosted stuff that was not accessible to regular users. I always had the impression that it was adult content, but it could very well have been pirated software. (These were publicly listed BBSes.)

Probably both, from my experience back then.

Most pirate BBSes publicly advertised themselves, as a form of bluster.. But having the phone number and getting an account were two very different things. :-)

You had a Courier or nothing. They were amazing if your ISP (or warez bbs) had them at the other end. Proprietary compression / connection algorithms, I guess?

Pretty much the only modem I got ACTUAL 56K speeds with was a Courier V.34 that I flashed to become a V.90

The standardized compression is called v.42Bis, but it was in fact a feature present only on few of USR's models while most of the other brands provided it with consistency. It worked well on plain-text content - I remember hitting 90 KB/sec download speeds when testing large text files on a 28k8 connection - and it made a noticable improvement when bouncing between menus and reading messages and such, but very limited use for actual file transfers since practically everything was already lha/lzh/lzx/dms-compressed.

Their popularity was because of aggressive marketing and sponsoring from USR, rather than being technically better than the competition. In the 1990s loads of Swedish BBSes had small USR advertisement blurbs on their login screens as thanks for the discounted hardware. The push even made it all the way into the elite boards (invite-only warez BBSes). Source: I ran two BBSes in the 90s and spent a few years co-sysoping a large elite board along with doing a lot of "modem trading" (slinging warez between boards).

What year was 300bps the state of the art?

Until about 1985. That's when the first 1200 baud consumer-available modems like the Commodore 1670 started arriving.

There were others available slightly earlier, but they were commercial-grade and prohibitively expensive for most people.

An XT class luggable of mine had a Memory/RTC/GamePort/Parallel/Serial/InternalModem card installed when I acquired it. Some research on the card showed it was released in 1986. If they were being put on multifunction cards then the market had to already have been full of dedicated cards.

I was around and using modems at the time but really don't remember the brief era of 1200 baud modems. The family TRS-80 Model 1 had a Novation CAT 300 attached which my father's work let him take home when they disposed of it around 1980. In the mid-80's my C64 used a 300 baud Commodore 1660 modem. Next thing I remember, I was shoving an internal 2400 baud modem into a new Packard Bell PB500 XT class machine. That modem got well used.

> There were others available slightly earlier, but they were commercial-grade and prohibitively expensive

They were not “commercial grade” exclusively. I had a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 in 1983 or 1984. It was absolutely consumer. In fact the case was identical to the Smartmodem 300 but with an extra LED or two. I hooked it up to an Apple 2e. It was indeed expensive, though.

1200 bps modems were available for the IBM PC much earlier than that. I think by 1982 your could get a 1200 or even 2400 bps modem for the PC. The AT models in 1984 standardized the faster speeds.

300 baud modems were still popular in the 1980s, because most people still used home microcomputers, and that's what was available for those low end machines. Atari even sold an acoustic coupler modem for their 8-bit computers that was very popular as it was quite inexpensive.

Consider yourself lucky. I had a 2400 bps modem in 1995, my first year on the internet. The ISP recommended 9600 bps but everything seemed ok for 14 year old me. IRC was fine and most websites didn't have too many pictures.

Ditto here, I got a 2400 ISA internal modem for Christmas 1993.

I catapulted headlong into CompuServe, found it largely boring, found a copy of the 313 BBS list in some file area, and started calling local boards.

I was "that bastard tying up the line for too long with his slow-ass modem" once in a while, but mostly I was tossing QWK/BlueWave mail packets which only took a few minutes anyway, and I tried to do my long file transfers in the middle of the night.

As soon as I got on the internet and discovered alt.binaries, I scrambled to upgrade. 28.8's were out but still quite expensive, and they had pushed 14.4's into affordable territory so that's where I landed. I think that must've been around 1995.

I had a 14.4K modem, but the dial-in pool for my ISP only supported 2400 bps speeds. It took me most of the day to download the first C&C demo file which was 10 MB IIRC.

before 1987, really. When 1200 bps modems were released and the standard for that finalized, the 300 bps were a lot less costly and occupied the low end of the market.

At the point that 1200 and 2400 bps modems became available, most everyone who could afford it in the BBS communities upgraded. By 1992 a 2400 bps modem was a very low cost ISA card for a normal x86 PC and commonly included with most desktop PCs sold.

My first paid programming gig was $20 for an Atari BASIC USR function (a way to call machine code from BASIC) to compute the XModem checksum for a block. Doing it in BASIC was fast enough for a 300 baud modem, but introduced a noticeable delay for a 1200 baud modem.

That $20 came to right something around $1/byte. Imagine if we got $1/byte for a node project or Win32 app nowadays... :)

Wikipedia claims 1200bps was available in the 70s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem I did start with a 1200bps modem back in the 80s, even then it was considered quite slow but was enough for email reading and basic bbs tasks. It sucked for any kind of download though.

I was using 300 baud back in 1986-1987 or so, though 1200 was definitely easily available by the late 80s and 2400 was cheap by 1991.

1200 bps didn't really show up as something people could buy until the early 1980s, however. In the mid 1970s if you had a 1200 bps modem it would be equivalent today to the cost of having a cisco or juniper router with several ports of 100GbE interface in your house. They were in use for university mainframe/minicomputer data links and such.

Don't know about state of the art, but in the early 80s, 300 bps was the economical choice, relatively speaking, for home users. 1200 bps were around but were a good deal less affordable and in quite a bit of the country, less reliable due to the general state of signal quality on the phone network at the time.

I know that even in the early 90's, there were still a few chat BBSs (D-Dails) using 300 baud in my area (Chicago) http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/APPLE/II/DIVERSIDIAL/

I had a 300/1200 unit on my Commodore 64, about 1983/4.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/50617/Minor%20Miracle...

It was our first modem for the Commodore 64 in the early 80's.

I was using a 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem in the late 1970's to connect to Compuserve via Tymnet.

If you were a fast reader you had no problems keeping up with incoming text.

I had a Hayes 1200 bps modem in 1983 or 1984. They were rare because of the expense. Most people, if they had a modem at all, had 300 at that time.

The greatest modem ever made, the Novation Apple-CAT II, was 300 bps, but 1200 bps half-duplex to another Apple-CAT II.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novation_CAT#The_Apple-CAT_II

Mid-end 80s. Started with a western digital 300 bauds on my c64. I remember i could boost it to 350bps before it would start garbling. Good times.

For me:

- Atari XM301 300bps external modem (for my Atari 130XE) in 1985

- Practical peripherals 2400bps ISA card modem on a PC/XT in 1987

- ATI 9600etc external modem on a 386SX in 1991

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