travelerrr wrote:
When the modems were 1200 baud, what exactly were you doing with them? I'm curious because they didn't really acquire mainstream usefulness until 9600+
I had a single line BBS (bulletin board system)... which, funny enough, was the grandmother to this very forum system. (note the term "BBCode" in the options when one is creating a post) We could login to other computers via phone lines, and yes... everything was command line based, you did have to watch the individual letters come up on the screen one at a time on an orange monitor, and there were no pictures, hence ansii art, but man... the oddball conversations we had. It was so worth it. I didn't sleep much.
Once I upgraded to 2400, I started to visit a BBS called Fly By Knight in Escondido, CA. We had to pay for minutes, but they had 14 phone lines (unheard of at the time) so we could actually chat together and play trivia games at the same time (and play Tradewars) not just post on the forums. All the common acronyms we use like lol and : ) originated on those boards. I also used to dial in to a university system and use archie, gopher and other command line run programs for finding documents country wide (the first internet) The universities were all connected back then. Well... not all of them, but the biggins. I could also get the university to dial long distance numbers that it would have to pay for, my call was local. (oooohhhh bad me) FTP worked back then too. You just had to know what numbers to call, really. There were lists you could download on BBS's.
But, yeah, mostly being social without having to actually be around other people. Go figure, I wasn't very good at that. : ) HA! Sure showed them tho... being all computery and geeky and stuff. And also, because I was a girl, boys were always trying to show off... so I'd just play dumb, and soak in all the details of what they were doing when they were peacocking. You can learn a lot that way. ; ) Well, if you can put up with the obligatory "You probably won't understand this... " remarks, or the "That's too complicated to explain to you... " type excuses because they clearly stole the script from someone else and didn't write it themselves so they didn't understand it. HAHAHA
It's been a while since I've reminisced about those days. Thank you for the question. I'm smiling.