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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

Compuserve was the first thing I dialed with my 1200 baud modem, back in 1988. I still have one of the original "sign up kits" at my parents' house!

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I called almost exclusively local BBSes with my 300 bps modem starting in 1985. There was no local Compuserve dial-in number for me. Between the long distance and the per minute charges, Compuserve was out of reach.

By the way, your 1200 bps modem was actually 600 baud! People often use baud and bps interchangeably but they're different. The most common 1200 bps standard was v.22 which used 600 baud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ITU-T_V-series_recomme...

I mostly called local BBSes. I had to get on CompuServe first, to even find the numbers for local ones. I ran my own BBS for a while, also! Fun times. I still miss those days.

I literally added a 1200 baud modem to my first computer purchase so that I could dial in to CompuServe. Living in the countryside it was an expensive long distance call just to connect and that cost limited my usage but I sure enjoyed it.

Modems used to cost a dollar a baud!

Introduction To Time Shared Systems (June 1972):

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2020/isde-...

>Apparently, there's a rough rule-of-thumb formula that the cost of a modem is about a dollar per baud. This estimate accounts for the extras that are usually added as rated speed is increased to give the device its 1-m1*in-turn utility.

My cable modem (which actually cost $120) is capable of 1.4Gbps downstream and so should cost $1.4B (or $700M and change if you give only $0.50 per baud per direction).

$1.2 * 10^2 vs $1.4 * 10^9.

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