Hacker News Reader

Comment by mondainx | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler. I'm thinking this might make a good xmas present for myself! :)

View on HN

> I miss the days of BBS'ing on my 300 baud modem, boosted to 420-ish. Things were so much simpler.

I have a lot of nostalgia from this time, but also remember it was all fun and games until my mom or one of my sisters picked up one of the phones (standard issue AT&T handsets) in the house, causing a rapid burst of line noise and usually a disconnection due to lack of error checking/correction at the hardware level.

And if that happened, you might not get back on. The line might be busy, you might have run out of time or logins for the day..

If you had some idea of who was on the BBS and they had Call Waiting, you could give them a ring to knock them offline. Very bad manners but teens will be teens.

> boosted to 420-ish

I was there in the 300 bps days with a Novation Apple Cat II and I never heard of such a thing. How did that work? Did you have non-standard modems on both ends?

If you had a pretty clean line, you could do 450 baud. Some BBSes had separate numbers for this speed. Sometimes it just worked with regular 300 lines.

Really? What standard allowed that? I'm only aware of 300 bps and 1200 bps. I'm not seeing anything in between those besides a V.22 standard for 600 bps I wasn't previously familiar with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interface_bit_rates

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem#Dial-up

I also don't recall intermediate speeds. The modems at both ends would negotiate the highest standard speed they could. I must've owned a dozen dialup modems over the years starting with that Novation Apple Cat II (300 bps, 1200 bps half-duplex to another Apple Cat II) and just have no recollection of variable speeds like you're describing, and I spent a lot of time dialed into BBSes.

There's lots of knowledge from that era that didn't make it to the internet age. Not being listed on Wikipedia does not mean something didn't exist.

Maybe your modem just didn't support it. Or maybe it was one of the many mods people did to their modems.

I know that at least one of the modems I had (a combination of Commodore, Hayes, and Avatex modems) supported higher-than-usual baud rates out of the box. I can't say how exactly it worked, you just issued commands or the terminal program handled it.

Sure, it's possible it escaped both my memory/experience and what's on the Wikipedia. But I spent a ton of time online dialed into BBSes started around 1980, even running a small ISP in college. I have a CS degree. I took telecommunications courses in college. If there's something that escaped my knowledge, I'd love to know more about it.

To the very best of my knowledge, dial-up modems jumped from 300 bps to 1200 bps, and they exchanged data at whatever the highest speed they could negotiate. The Novation Apple Cat II modem was also pretty unique in that it supported 1200 bps half-duplex, but only to another Apple Cat II, and it also had the ability to detect and generate arbitrary tones. There were programs for it to play music and to use it as a voice modulator.

Which is all to say, I was pretty into this stuff.

So I'm really interested in any information about a modem that worked at intermediate speeds like 450 bps.

I searched textfiles.com but couldn't find anything there either.

FWIW, I had a very strong memory of a graphical BBS program that worked on the Apple II using hi-res mode and a dedicated client. I asked about it here over the years but was never able to find any confirmation it existed:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2036329

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17882989

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23931096

I was questioning my memory that it existed, but then three years ago I tracked it down:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33256053

- https://www.reddit.com/r/apple2/comments/kpx9zl/hbbs/

So yeah, I totally understand the internet is missing a lot of pre-web history.

100% with you. I miss those times.. High-5 to a fellow 300bauder!

I built my own 300bps modem as a teenager, to connect to my C64. Tech was a lot more fun back in the day. It was exciting every year to see the speed of modems go up, and up, and up. 300 bps, 1200bps, and then when I got a 2400bps modem the C64 built-in serial code was too slow, I couldn't transfer files because there were so many dropped bits. So I wrote my own serial port code in assembly language and hacked it into my favorite terminal software (CCGMS) and that fixed the problem. I think by the time I got a 9600 baud modem I probably had an Amiga.

By the time you get to 2400bps you're starting to stress how fast the abysmal disk interface on the C64 could write data, you had better not hit too many seeks.

The 1541 drive can write at ~400 bytes per second, much faster than the 2400bps modem could deliver (240 bytes/s). And buffering was a thing back then. A simple ring buffer would suffice. I had no problems downloading at 2400bps after I fixed the serial code.

Faster, but not "much faster". Depending on where you were writing it could be as low as 300 bytes/second. You're starting to cut close to the margins, especially if the C=64 is having to also manage the modem communications at the same time. So yeah, doable but that's about the max you can expect out of the hardware. A 4800 baud modem would be right out.

The C64 doesn't control the disk drive directly, the 1541has its own CPU, about as powerful as the C64.

> A 4800 baud modem would be right out.

Not with a "Warp Speed" cartridge. It does write speeds on a stock C64/1541 up to 2900 Bytes per second. I'm pretty sure reading serial data faster than 2400bps is easily doable too.

https://www.obliterator918.com/the-warp-speed-cartridge-from...

Modern 1541 turbo, like Krills Transwarp, tops out just shy of 20KB/s on unmodified hardware https://csdb.dk/release/?id=214786 with steady 16KB/s in normal use https://www.obliterator918.com/benchmarking-transwarp-the-in... The trick is encoding files in special way to minimize drives CPU load.

CCGMS was the best.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com