My first was a Hayes Smartmodem 1200. My father worked for Xerox, and lived 2 hours from the office, so was able to connect into the mainframe from home in 1984. A great example of working from remote almost 40 years ago.
I had 300 baud dumbmodems and a 110 baud printer terminal.
Koda, you use unixy stuff. Do you know why ed defaults to one line and vi has a 2-display line mode? If you worked at 110 baud it would be clear. Even 300 baud in a video terminal (ADM 3A) is pokey.
If you didn't have hardware handshaking you HAD to recognize flow-control codes, to make the source halt before your buffer (often very small) overflowed on the cave floor.
I can't find 2-line mode in any modern copy of vi, most of which are deeply re-engineered from Bill Joy's project.
Koda, you use unixy stuff. Do you know why ed defaults to one line and vi has a 2-display line mode? If you worked at 110 baud it would be clear. Even 300 baud in a video terminal (ADM 3A) is pokey.
If you didn't have hardware handshaking you HAD to recognize flow-control codes, to make the source halt before your buffer (often very small) overflowed on the cave floor.
I can't find 2-line mode in any modern copy of vi, most of which are deeply re-engineered from Bill Joy's project.
X-on and X-off can still be faster than HW.
As far as ED or VI - Stop torturing yourself! Try Nano! 🙂
As far as ED or VI - Stop torturing yourself! Try Nano! 🙂
In 1985 my first modem was 1200 baud and advertised as "screaming fast" vs. 300 baud.
One magazine article claimed 1200 baud would never take off, because people can't read the incoming text that fast.
We had Dow Jones News Service which cost something like $1.50 per minute for access.
Wasn't long before 2400 came out.
One magazine article claimed 1200 baud would never take off, because people can't read the incoming text that fast.
We had Dow Jones News Service which cost something like $1.50 per minute for access.
Wasn't long before 2400 came out.
Meanwhile in France we had minitel. As dumb terminal system it was a good system with a lot of information available. And chat, and sexting of course.
I bought groceries online (minitel) in the 80s, but it kept us away from Usenet and BBS that were happening elsewhere.
I bought groceries online (minitel) in the 80s, but it kept us away from Usenet and BBS that were happening elsewhere.
Ditto, it was part of my newly built (1976) SWTPC 6800 computer system which ran at a blazingly fast 921 KHz clock speed with 4 K of 1 uS static ram. In its fully expanded glory (about 1978) it took up most of my work bench and ran a MC 6809 CPU at 2 MHz with 64 K of bank switched memory. It all got ditched when we learned how to clone Apple II's and my TRS-80 died for the third time. By 1983 I had a genuine IBM 5 slot PC that ran at a faster than light 4.77 MHz. It came from some creative dumpster diving at the IBM plant where the PC was invented in Boca Raton.
I worked in the phone group from the first iDEN phone up to the i2000 (iDEN and GSM phone) when I left the phone group for a research job. The i600 was a cost reduced version of the popular i370 "pocket phone." Both were 2G phones as they had no data handling capabilities. These phones stuffed 6 walkie talkie calls or 3 phone calls into a single 25 KHz radio channel which normally handles 1 voice conversation when used for "mission critical" communications like police and fire. The later iDEN phones could stack several channels together for slow data service and added a low resolution camera. Those were considered 2.5G phones, but the term "G" in the phone world has different meanings to different people. AT&T was known for calling some of their 3G phones "4G" even though they were not LTE capable, which brought about the legal term 4G LTE. Some vendors today are doing the same thing with 5G, by calling a 4G phone that can handle multiple 4G data streams simultaneously 5G.
The iDEN phones all pulsed their transmitters at an 11 Hz rate in walkie talkie mode, and 22 Hz in a phone call. Each phone had a time slot on that single radio channel so that up to 6 different phones could use the same channel at once. All iDEN phones had a "test mode" which could be activated from the keypad. "Splatter Check 2" mode was a full power transmitter blast. It was fun to enable splatter check then walk through the HiFi or TV sections of Best Buy or Circuit City stores in the early days of iDEN before anyone knew what was happening. Oddly enough a trip through a large Sam Ash music store brought a racket from some solid state guitar amps, but not much response from the tube amps. The worst offender was a $7000 Yamaha Digital Grand piano that went bonkers whenever any iDEN phone was in the store.
Let me explain a hypothetical situation that may or may not have ever happened. What would happen if someone took an iDEN phone and connected its output to an RF power amplifier and boosted the nominal 600 mW of power to about 15 Watts, then connected it to a gain antenna? Imagine the racket that could occur when a dark colored Escalade pulled up next to said device with its windows vibrating from the bass inside, and said device was activated. How fast can several people get out of a large SUV when it sounded like a helicopter was landing on its roof? More than one of these devices might have existed.
The largest consumer of iDEN equipment in the world was Nextel in the US. Clearnet in Canada was number two. Sprint bought Nextel stating that they would keep the service operating, and "improve it." Their improvement was to convert all iDEN service over to Qualcomm's "Q chat" CDMA based system which required all new phones. Q chat didn't work as well as iDEN did for the walkie talkie service which was the reason for Nextel's existence, so Nextel died. Sprint made deals with the other big carriers for a giant spectrum swap which left no spectrum for iDEN to operate in so nationwide iDEN service was no longer available. There were several smaller iDEN based phone / truck dispatch carriers most notable was Southern Company which was a rural electric company in the southeast US, and Disney World which ran their own iDEN system for internal use. Nextel de Mexico, and Nextel SA (South America) also remained in service. After a few years these died since there wasn't enough sales volume to justify building phones for them.
In the dog eat dog world of business, Sprint bought Radio Shack and tried to convert most of them to Sprint phone stores. There was no Sprint service here so our Radio Shack store lasted about two weeks. Most other stores suffered a similar fate. Sprint was eventually eaten by T-Mobile.
The same Wall Street Wizard that bought his way into three Florida based airlines, busted them up and parted then out like a junk car had his way with Motorola. The company was busted up and parted out. The brand name was also sold to different users in different markets. The Motorola name in the cell phone world is now owned by Lenovo, the Chinese computer company that bought the PC business from IBM. They still make decent phones for good prices, and I am now on my third "Lenovorola." I believe the current legal use of the Motorola phone brand is "Motorola Mobility." After leaving the phone group in 2000, I went to a research arm in the old communications group that makes public safety (police, fire, and military) radio equipment. That is the only remaining piece of the old Chicago based "Motorola" company. The legal name is now "Motorola Solutions." I took a buyout in 2014 after 41 years of working in 6 different plants in 5 different technical operations in South Florida.
Fasinating info, George!
Thanks for this.
I was with Clearnet, and I was 19 I think.
I then took a contract with Bell Mobility to do third level support for "Digital Data to Go" essentially the CDMA version of GPRS with a serial interface like on the Qualcomm QCP-2700 - Two days before it launched.
It was really the launch of "2G" from the standpoint that most phones were still using AMPS at the time.
You could get 9600 bps in most cases, and 14,400 in best cases.
I was the guy who found out why a certain customers system didn't work properly... You couldn't use a . in a phone number. I always wrote numbers like 555-555-1212 or 5555551212, they did 555.555.1212 and it didn't work like that. Qualcomm's parser thought of the . as a decimal place 🙂
They fixed that pretty quickly LOL (it was a large customer)
Thanks for this.
I was with Clearnet, and I was 19 I think.
I then took a contract with Bell Mobility to do third level support for "Digital Data to Go" essentially the CDMA version of GPRS with a serial interface like on the Qualcomm QCP-2700 - Two days before it launched.
It was really the launch of "2G" from the standpoint that most phones were still using AMPS at the time.
You could get 9600 bps in most cases, and 14,400 in best cases.
I was the guy who found out why a certain customers system didn't work properly... You couldn't use a . in a phone number. I always wrote numbers like 555-555-1212 or 5555551212, they did 555.555.1212 and it didn't work like that. Qualcomm's parser thought of the . as a decimal place 🙂
They fixed that pretty quickly LOL (it was a large customer)
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This is the fate of just about any good business. Look at the banking industry. The "big three" gobble up every viable community bank like Pac Man. It's not good for consumers.
Motorola was a real, actual company that made a tangible product. We can't have that. My former companies were bought by Goldman and some French bank, respectively. They were bought for the sole purpose of obtaining their customers and dissolving the companies, costing thousands of high paying jobs.
We can't have consumer choices and high paying jobs any more. It's against everything that America stands for now.
"Family Dollar" is in every community and every town in the US, no matter how poor and run down it may be. The presence of this store quells any hope of a local business opening in many small communities.
It's been a long time since I've been in a Family Dollar, but I remember there wasn't a single item worthy of consideration. It was all complete junk. The store is no substitute for Mom and Pop stores. I don't get why they're even in business.
It's been a long time since I've been in a Family Dollar, but I remember there wasn't a single item worthy of consideration. It was all complete junk. The store is no substitute for Mom and Pop stores. I don't get why they're even in business.
To Mr. Chop Saw operator the parting out of Motorola made sense, and a lot of money for the people on board with his plan. What he did not understand was the facts that are now blatantly obvious to us, and partly obvious to those shopping for a car.
Motorola was a nearly perfect vertically integrated company. The most profitable business, that made communications equipment for first responders runs production volumes in the tens of thousands per year. All the unique, and most of the commodity components we needed, we made. Need a custom chip specifically designed for one radio product with low volumes, but huge profit margins? No problem, we have several chip fabs, choose one. Need unique patented quartz crystals, yeah we make those too. Custom microelectronics, no problem. As the vertical structure was being demolished, there was a high volume purchasing system in place buying millions of parts per year. That division did not make much money some years as cell phones became commodities, but If I needed a sample chip for an experiment, one phone call usually got me a reel. Some of the big players in the semi business had me on their rounds for a monthly visit. Hey, Arcadio can you get me a few of these neat new audio chips your company makes? What do you want them for? A guitar amp. OK, can you make one for my son? OK. Done. I still have a few 1990's vintage National SPI controllable tone controls, equalizers and of course chip amps.
Bust up the company part out everything but the two way radio business. Want 10,000 custom chips? Design them yourself, then find a fab that will build you a short run. It takes two to three years to design a totally new custom CMOS RF chip. There are only a few chip processes in the world that can fab it. So you pick one of the most stable names in the business design it to their process, and spend two years doing test builds at half a million dollars and 4 months time each to get to a working, but not completely spec compliant chip. Then as you are preparing for the final qualification run of parts the giant business machine company decides to exit the chip making business and you get to start all over again on a new chip company's process. At that point, I take the buyout and exit the rat race.......the rats won!
The chip shortage issue only got worse after I left in 2014. The team that I was on had to redesign that chip a third time before ever getting to build any products with it. What's left of the team is now working on a two chip radio solution. I spent about an hour last night on the phone with one of my old coworkers. All I can say now is that I'm glad I left when I did.
Motorola was a nearly perfect vertically integrated company. The most profitable business, that made communications equipment for first responders runs production volumes in the tens of thousands per year. All the unique, and most of the commodity components we needed, we made. Need a custom chip specifically designed for one radio product with low volumes, but huge profit margins? No problem, we have several chip fabs, choose one. Need unique patented quartz crystals, yeah we make those too. Custom microelectronics, no problem. As the vertical structure was being demolished, there was a high volume purchasing system in place buying millions of parts per year. That division did not make much money some years as cell phones became commodities, but If I needed a sample chip for an experiment, one phone call usually got me a reel. Some of the big players in the semi business had me on their rounds for a monthly visit. Hey, Arcadio can you get me a few of these neat new audio chips your company makes? What do you want them for? A guitar amp. OK, can you make one for my son? OK. Done. I still have a few 1990's vintage National SPI controllable tone controls, equalizers and of course chip amps.
Bust up the company part out everything but the two way radio business. Want 10,000 custom chips? Design them yourself, then find a fab that will build you a short run. It takes two to three years to design a totally new custom CMOS RF chip. There are only a few chip processes in the world that can fab it. So you pick one of the most stable names in the business design it to their process, and spend two years doing test builds at half a million dollars and 4 months time each to get to a working, but not completely spec compliant chip. Then as you are preparing for the final qualification run of parts the giant business machine company decides to exit the chip making business and you get to start all over again on a new chip company's process. At that point, I take the buyout and exit the rat race.......the rats won!
The chip shortage issue only got worse after I left in 2014. The team that I was on had to redesign that chip a third time before ever getting to build any products with it. What's left of the team is now working on a two chip radio solution. I spent about an hour last night on the phone with one of my old coworkers. All I can say now is that I'm glad I left when I did.
I hear ya George, I worked for both Motorola Comm (we have shared our common experiences) and HP Computer System group in their good ole days, its a shame they broke them up, the founders would be awefully upset with what transpired. But at least Onsemi and HP/Agilent/Keysight continue the legacies.
I recall HP selling off some of the computer system mfg (Fort Collins,Co) to Celestica ( old IBM mfg), this was at the start to "out of house, sub-contract mfg". Celestica is still around, they have a plant not too far from me. It was only a matter of time it got expanded to Co's doing fabless mfg & design.
I have old colleages, now long time friends that I worked with at HP, I was in pcb design, they were doing ASIC's. They now work for AMD, Broadcom and Qualcom, to name the big guns. We get together for our annual BBQ, so we can hash out todays design environment and what's changed since I worked in the industry. The old work culture ( The HP way) is what's sadly missing today. Last time we met, it was announced that Harold is now a fellow at AMD (old ATI), he is a master of the CODEC, the nicest guy you could ever meet 🙂 take care everyone and enjoy your memories of the past.
I recall HP selling off some of the computer system mfg (Fort Collins,Co) to Celestica ( old IBM mfg), this was at the start to "out of house, sub-contract mfg". Celestica is still around, they have a plant not too far from me. It was only a matter of time it got expanded to Co's doing fabless mfg & design.
I have old colleages, now long time friends that I worked with at HP, I was in pcb design, they were doing ASIC's. They now work for AMD, Broadcom and Qualcom, to name the big guns. We get together for our annual BBQ, so we can hash out todays design environment and what's changed since I worked in the industry. The old work culture ( The HP way) is what's sadly missing today. Last time we met, it was announced that Harold is now a fellow at AMD (old ATI), he is a master of the CODEC, the nicest guy you could ever meet 🙂 take care everyone and enjoy your memories of the past.
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That group has some very good lawyers and negotiators. They managed to be both the incumbent supplier and developer of the replacement for the Airwave solution in UK (Tetra for the geeks). With absolutely no conflict of interest at all but a nice earner keeping the old network running whilst the new one doesn't work (and won't work for another few years as motorola has been kicked off the contract so back to square 1). So far 12 years late and the tetra network costs about £250M a year to run. Note I am not blaming Moto for this as it is 100% the government's fault for going 'ooh shiny' and not thinking it through.
I still use alpine for email. As a text based email client, it does not get infected, and it does not report back to someone when they insert a 1 pixel jpeg inline in the message. Not sure if you have to have your own email server to use it though. I do so it is not a problem.
I use MimeStream on the Mac. You can set it up so it doesn't load remote images or tracking gizmos.
I started using FidoNet, BBSes, etc. at 2400 baud in the mid/late 80s. I can still recognize the baud rate based on the screechy noises the modem makes until it connects.
I remember being at some family gathering around that time and telling everybody about all this electronic connectivity, electronic mail, and whatnot. Quite a few in my family scoffed at the notion of electronic mail. Why would anyone use that?! 5-6 years later we were all using this newfangled World Wide Web and had email addresses. 🙂
Tom
I started using FidoNet, BBSes, etc. at 2400 baud in the mid/late 80s. I can still recognize the baud rate based on the screechy noises the modem makes until it connects.
I remember being at some family gathering around that time and telling everybody about all this electronic connectivity, electronic mail, and whatnot. Quite a few in my family scoffed at the notion of electronic mail. Why would anyone use that?! 5-6 years later we were all using this newfangled World Wide Web and had email addresses. 🙂
Tom
Yes, email has come a long way. I think I even used some sort of mail at school in the late 70's on PDP's running UNIX. I do miss plain text email though. I've never understood why "Hello World" should require a 10MB message size. Alpine generates maybe 100 bytes with all the headers for such a message.
I had the first residential ISDN modem, cable modem and 802.11b installation in my zip code
The IDSN line was a PITA at first... everytime the telco guys did work in the vault they'd reinstall ferrite cores in my wires and they'd destroy the connection... the phone company gave a 2nd tier service number so I could call and they'd dispatch someone within 30 minutes to fix it. Eventually they put a note on my wires NOT to install ferrite cores.
The cable modem was interesting. First of all I installed a prototype NAT interface with one of our old routers from work... the Tier 1 "techs" had no clue what it was.... Eventually, again, I got a direct number to a Tier 2 support office and they understood what I was doing. I ended up setting up a DMZ machine with the test loopback enabled so whenever the cable folks had issues they could test to my connection. Behind that I had a second NAT/Router and my own Intranet.
At some point I had the cable and the ISDN as main/backup routing to the WAN ( different ISPs ).
Because of the DMZ, I had free cable Internet access until 2004... about 8 years!
I also had the first 802.11b set up in the zip code (well, at that time I think one of my coworkers who lived somewhat near by also got it set up). Our employer gave us deep discounts, 70% off, so I had the access point with two PC card modems.... That was around 1999.
The best one was in 2000 when I started to get porno spam on my personal mail server. My kids were getting it too... So I traced it to a guy up in Montreal using AT&T Canada. I kept sending complains to the telco and the ISP... but nothing was getting done, so I escalated it to the local police, the Montreal police, my local politicians, Attorney General etc.... I wrote a script so could trace the spam... and daily I'd send the complain with all the information.
Nothing was getting down... so one evening I included president@white_house.gov ( or something like that ) in my complain:
"Dear Mr. President, I know you are very busy, but this is getting out of hand... my kids are getting pornographic spam, I have found out who is doing it but nobody will do anything about it. Could you assign someone to look into it? I'm including the report that I did to trace the source of the porno."..
Believe it or not... whithin three days the spam stopped... and the guy's account went away within a month.
If you get phishing.... forward the email to the abuse email address of the service they are trying to emulate. Ie: abuse@costco.com.
The IDSN line was a PITA at first... everytime the telco guys did work in the vault they'd reinstall ferrite cores in my wires and they'd destroy the connection... the phone company gave a 2nd tier service number so I could call and they'd dispatch someone within 30 minutes to fix it. Eventually they put a note on my wires NOT to install ferrite cores.
The cable modem was interesting. First of all I installed a prototype NAT interface with one of our old routers from work... the Tier 1 "techs" had no clue what it was.... Eventually, again, I got a direct number to a Tier 2 support office and they understood what I was doing. I ended up setting up a DMZ machine with the test loopback enabled so whenever the cable folks had issues they could test to my connection. Behind that I had a second NAT/Router and my own Intranet.
At some point I had the cable and the ISDN as main/backup routing to the WAN ( different ISPs ).
Because of the DMZ, I had free cable Internet access until 2004... about 8 years!
I also had the first 802.11b set up in the zip code (well, at that time I think one of my coworkers who lived somewhat near by also got it set up). Our employer gave us deep discounts, 70% off, so I had the access point with two PC card modems.... That was around 1999.
The best one was in 2000 when I started to get porno spam on my personal mail server. My kids were getting it too... So I traced it to a guy up in Montreal using AT&T Canada. I kept sending complains to the telco and the ISP... but nothing was getting done, so I escalated it to the local police, the Montreal police, my local politicians, Attorney General etc.... I wrote a script so could trace the spam... and daily I'd send the complain with all the information.
Nothing was getting down... so one evening I included president@white_house.gov ( or something like that ) in my complain:
"Dear Mr. President, I know you are very busy, but this is getting out of hand... my kids are getting pornographic spam, I have found out who is doing it but nobody will do anything about it. Could you assign someone to look into it? I'm including the report that I did to trace the source of the porno."..
Believe it or not... whithin three days the spam stopped... and the guy's account went away within a month.
If you get phishing.... forward the email to the abuse email address of the service they are trying to emulate. Ie: abuse@costco.com.
You could implode the Goldman building today and nothing of importance would be lost. If anything, value would be added to the global economy. Remember the Eurozone crisis brought on by Greece hiding their debts until they joined the EU? Aided by Goldman's gang of crooks, er, "financial wizards". The 2008 mortgage crisis was another gift from Goldman. And so on and so on. Forbes -- Forbes! -- approvingly quoted Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece describing Goldman as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” when discussing yet another GS parasitism. Paypal scams aren't even in the game when these beauties not only prosper by screwing their clients but also send the CEO to run the Treasury.
As Ellen Ripley said: "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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