Where do we come from, where do we go, where do we come from, Cotton Eyed Joe?

I have worked in the computer industry for a long time. The first time I worked for a software company was in 1982 (yes, 1982) I was working in technical support for a company that timeshared a DEC 2060. We had all sorts of computer and communications equipment, as most (well, all) of our clients were remote. I started just as we were retiring the old acoustic coupler modems (300 Baud. Think BPS, but just a tad bit different) to a blinding last 1200 baud dial up modem. I think that my sister still has my old rack mounted modem that I used from home. But more from that later.

You remember the old acoustic coupling modems. You dialed (dialing was perfectly ok, I mean with a rotary dial) a seven digit number (remember those?) and hope it was not busy. Since we didn’t even have roll over lines, the client had to keep a list of all the phone numbers that we had leased, and keep dialing until they got an answer. Once you heard the ring, you waited for the data tone. Now, this is not that jivey tone you hear today, but really just straight static. I was able to get the phone to connect by whistling when I was in a good mood. But really what you were supposed to do was put the hand set you remember those? They had a speaker on one side and a mouthpiece on the other. The acoustic coupler would just translate the sounds to the phone line, which was connected to a modem (Which stands for MOdulator, DEModulator, by the way. So there is really no such thing as a Cable Modem or a DSL modem. Call ‘em routers, don’t call ‘em modems.) on the other side of the line. That was our side. We then connected it to the DEC, which ran the TOPS operating system. Oddly similar to MS/DOS – go figure.

We then charged the clients by three things – disk storage, CPU time, and Connect time. Connect time was easy, and so was storage. Anyone could figure that out. CPU, on the other hand, was more “flexible”. It could be tweaked to provide a more “accurate” number that the clients would be charged for. I believed that helped with revenue more than one month. Of course, remember, I was just a customer support rep…

Ah, but then we move up to the 1200 baud (which I believe were really 1200 BPS) modems. What a great thing! You didn’t have to worry about the rubber cups. You dials the number, and now when you heard the tone (the 1200 baud tone, which was a different number than the 300 baud number) you simply flipped the “Voice/Data” switch. Much nicer.

The great thing about 1200 baud is that you can read that fast – easily. The 300 baud modem is like listening to a five year old read. A 1200 baud modem is like reading subtitles. The first painfully slow, the second comfortable for understanding. It would be years before 2400 baud came out.

That’s a start.