17-09-2004, 11:23 PM
Quote:Originally posted by picanin
Indeed........ my good ole 1200baud modem dialling up to the various BBS's around SA. The forerunners to the internet. Downloading an app took forever - and God help if the BBS didnt support Z-Modem - if they were really iffy they would use Kermit or X-modem - then you could be on all night!
Long nights spent chatting on Beltel ended in bills of around R1000 just for the phone calls!
Then the internet came and so too my flashy all singing all dancing 2400 modem. A UNIX shell account with internet Africa gave me acess to more information than I thought possible using Gopher as well as Archie. But all that paled when compared to the newsgroups! USENET was a God! You could get an asnwer to any question using USENET as well as access to all sorts of interesting but often illegal content!
Ahhh the good old days!
My first experince with a modem was also with a 1200 baud dial up which we took home when we had to be on standby as it may save us a trip to work if it was something simple we could fix from home. Only problem was that by the time you'd got the history log on the screen you could've been at work already :mad: :haha:
What did amaze me though was that our supplier in Switzerland could log on to our VAXes and diagnose and download patches from there... I mean they were from the other side of the world.... LOL
I then got a 2400 baud modem, paid for by myself and it cost almost as the computer itself, thinking that I could use it for talking faster to the comps at work but alas they still ran at 1200....
By that stage the internet was up and running and the pages were quite 'heavy' and I got really mal when I'd lose the connection and have to dial up and start all over again.... :mad: I can't recall the amount of the phone bills but they were quite hefty, in fact so much so that I'd get up at 3 o'clock in the morning to do my surfing as it was cheaper then...
Hmmm !!! Those were indeed the bad old days... LOL