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The Audiophile Network, BBSes, and The Good Old Days
Jun 24, 2013 at 3:25 PM Post #16 of 37
I was stuck at 300 baud until I finally broke down and bought a 2400 baud Practical Peripherals card - best money I ever spent!

But lordy, the time wasted bringing down "part 29 of 1764 parts" at 300 baud!!!

The zmodem protocol was like golden magic compared to xmodem & ymodem. I remember that if you were a real gambling man, you used ymodem-g. It was MUCH faster than ymodem, because it had no error correction - it depended on the two modems to do all the error correction - but that also meant that if you did drop a packet, there were no resends and no restarts - your download just failed and you had to start over from the beginning. I don't even remember what the heck I was downloading - probably some cheesy ASCII game or a bootleg copy of Procomm... :rolleyes:
 
Jun 24, 2013 at 9:00 PM Post #17 of 37
Quote:
billybob_jcv said:
I was stuck at 300 baud until I finally broke down and bought a 2400 baud Practical Peripherals card - best money I ever spent!

But lordy, the time wasted bringing down "part 29 of 1764 parts" at 300 baud!!!

The zmodem protocol was like golden magic compared to xmodem & ymodem. I remember that if you were a real gambling man, you used ymodem-g. It was MUCH faster than ymodem, because it had no error correction - it depended on the two modems to do all the error correction - but that also meant that if you did drop a packet, there were no resends and no restarts - your download just failed and you had to start over from the beginning. I don't even remember what the heck I was downloading - probably some cheesy ASCII game or a bootleg copy of Procomm...
rolleyes.gif
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Ya man! 
 
Zmodem was the best. 
 
How about the dial-up via acoustic coupler to the unix main frame's at the arpa net? 110 baud half duplex....
 
Jun 24, 2013 at 11:55 PM Post #18 of 37
I don't remember anyone ever using anything but Zmodem. Must be way before my time. I think I started calling BBSs around 1993 or so. Back then we only had one internet service around in my small city. First time I heard about a BBS was from an ad I saw in a local paper. It was "Maze Master's Game Quest". I only had a 2400bps modem but later upgraded to a 14,400 by selling junk at a yard sale. I was a Cardinal brand modem that randomly disconnected me. I bought it from the SysOp and he even came out and installed it for me.
 
I ran a BBS for a few years and then AOL came around and I lost members. I still remember my mom being so annoyed with me tying up the phone that she got me my very own line. I was probably 15 or so when I was into BBSs (i'm now 34).
 
I started with Renegade and then later switched to Iniquity. Most of the larger BBSs used Major BBS (? is that right?). I just know it was sold by Galacticom.
 
I seriously can't imagine now what it would be like to use dial up now..
 
BTW I remember playing my first mp3 file. It made my computer stutter because it was so slow. Kind of funny...I think I only had a 486 or something.
 
Jun 25, 2013 at 1:39 AM Post #19 of 37
tdockweiler said:
I don't remember anyone ever using anything but Zmodem. Must be way before my time. I think I started calling BBSs around 1993 or so. Back then we only had one internet service around in my small city. First time I heard about a BBS was from an ad I saw in a local paper. It was "Maze Master's Game Quest". I only had a 2400bps modem but later upgraded to a 14,400 by selling junk at a yard sale. I was a Cardinal brand modem that randomly disconnected me. I bought it from the SysOp and he even came out and installed it for me.

I ran a BBS for a few years and then AOL came around and I lost members. I still remember my mom being so annoyed with me tying up the phone that she got me my very own line. I was probably 15 or so when I was into BBSs (i'm now 34).

I started with Renegade and then later switched to Iniquity. Most of the larger BBSs used Major BBS (? is that right?). I just know it was sold by Galacticom.

I seriously can't imagine now what it would be like to use dial up now..

BTW I remember playing my first mp3 file. It made my computer stutter because it was so slow. Kind of funny...I think I only had a 486 or something.
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1993? lol - you're just noob! :p I think I connected to my first BBS in 1982 or 83. I was on Compuserve by ~1985 (on DOS) and I tried AOL for a while right after they released AOL for Windows, then I went back to Compuserve when they added connections to the mysterious "internet". By that time (mid 90s I think) I was already using the internet at work - I was working at a Navy base and I used early versions of Mosaic & Netscape - back when Yahoo! was just a text directory of links and *real* web searching was done with Alta Vista. Everything was changing so FAST! 1985->1990->1995->2000 was a wild, wild time to be a tech geek!!

But, I was never a sysop or anything like that - I have always been just a user - browsing, chatting, downloading, etc.
 
Jun 25, 2013 at 1:41 AM Post #20 of 37
I remember a co-worker coming into work with a case from Motorola that had a computer chip in it along with the evaluation setup.
He rabbited on about how powerful the thing was.
I owned an Apple II clone for a bit. I installed a starcard in it so I could run CP/M.
When the pc first came out we had one at work. It came with a 10MB hardcard. Who would ever need 10MB? we thought.
Before that the computer system was CP/M with an Emerald backup tape system. It also had 8" single sided floppies.
 
I liked programming in machine code     for a while....    Glad that's long past, now.
 
Jun 25, 2013 at 3:56 AM Post #21 of 37
Jun 25, 2013 at 6:52 AM Post #23 of 37
Jun 25, 2013 at 3:27 PM Post #24 of 37
I used to run a WWIV and then a Renegade BBS, gawd I loved my big ol' USR Courier HST modems, they were the business. :cool: Also, I didn't offer Y or Xmodem, it was Zmodem (DSZ) or nothing at all. Being able to restart a DL was very important, considering how easily and often a user could get DCd back then.
 
Jun 25, 2013 at 3:33 PM Post #25 of 37
Good old days with AmiExpress boards and zyxel 14400 modems, trading games and demos. Tristar, red sector, world of wonders, genesis and angels, paranoimia, skid row, vision factory... God how I loved my amiga's.

 
Jun 25, 2013 at 3:39 PM Post #26 of 37
billybob_jcv said:
1993? lol - you're just noob! :p I think I connected to my first BBS in 1982 or 83. I was on Compuserve by ~1985 (on DOS) and I tried AOL for a while right after they released AOL for Windows, then I went back to Compuserve when they added connections to the mysterious "internet". By that time (mid 90s I think) I was already using the internet at work - I was working at a Navy base and I used early versions of Mosaic & Netscape - back when Yahoo! was just a text directory of links and *real* web searching was done with Alta Vista. Everything was changing so FAST! 1985->1990->1995->2000 was a wild, wild time to be a tech geek!!

But, I was never a sysop or anything like that - I have always been just a user - browsing, chatting, downloading, etc.
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Yep, yep. I was first dialing with my TRS-80 CoCo w/ 300 baud pulse-dial modem. It blew my mind. There's no way it could get better than that, right?
 
Jun 26, 2013 at 12:33 AM Post #27 of 37
Oooo - a CoCo - you must have been naughty in a previous life to have been saddled with a CoCo in this one. I had a C64 for a while - it wasn't as powerful as the CoCo (but it had 64K!), and there was a lot more available SW for the C64. Then I used my brother's TI-99/4A - that was a kick-@ss machine - ahead of it's time, but it also didn't sell nearly as well as the C64 & Apple II. I also used a TRS-80 Model III in college - those were good machines for writing basic - especially if you had the upgraded basic from Bill Gates. I have used a scary number of those old machines - some I just played with in the store - but back then I tried to get my hands on every computer I could find. Atari 400/800, Sinclair, Apple, Osborne, Commodore, TI, Radio Shack, Xerox, Coleco, DEC, Kaypro.
 
Jun 26, 2013 at 8:52 AM Post #28 of 37
I started with an Apple II, but I also had an Atari 400 and 800 and a Radio Shack TRS-80....Fun times!
 
Jul 3, 2013 at 6:24 PM Post #29 of 37
It looks like I found this thread relatively late...when we first were talking about making this a separate thread, it was when another thread went off-topic with reminiscences about The Audiophile Network (TAN), for which Steve Eddy was technical adviser. I don't know if anyone else here was a TANner, but it was one of the more amazing communities of audiophiles in the pre-Internet age.
 
Looking back, I'm trying to remember just how many audio writers were present on TAN during its heyday.  Some of them were already established, others actually got hired based on their TAN posts.  Among those I can definitely remember were:
 
John Atkinson (Stereophile, obviously)
Myles Astor (basically everywhere)
Jonathan Valin (TAS, Fi)
Corey Greenberg (Stereophile)
Jonathan Scull (TAS, Stereophile)
Kalman Rubison (Stereophile)
Jack English (...sounds like..., Stereophile)
Doug Blackburn (SoundStage)
 
I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting about.  If you were on TAN, could you help me complete the list?
 
Jul 3, 2013 at 10:36 PM Post #30 of 37
I wish I had found it back then. We were having too much fun with our own local community....
 
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