I remember having the 1024/248 fixed rate service, there would be several DSL dropouts per day on average. Quite surprising, to say that the downstream SNR margin would've been very high.

Edited by deleted (Sat 25-Mar-17 10:58:40)

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

It makes a change us getting something before the US, I bet they had a hissy fit about that

Yeah. Although maybe it was 33k. Whatever it was came after 19200 I remember being a bit surprised. My vague memory is that we skipped 19200 so perhaps the US got new modems that time and we got new modems next time.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

It makes a change us getting something before the US, I bet they had a hissy fit about that

Yeah. Although maybe it was 33k. Whatever it was came after 19200 I remember being a bit surprised. My vague memory is that we skipped 19200 so perhaps the US got new modems that time and we got new modems next time.

Well after my uncle took it back we had nothing until many years later when 9600 was around, but where it was only used for accessing BBS's to play door games or send Fido, Usernet messages etc we wasn't on that long, plus phone calls use to kill the connection

Ah those were the days

We then got a 57K6 (57,600) USB Modem which we used for a couple of years then ADSL started to get installed and we moved over to that.

Paul

Do you know why ADSL at first was so unstable?

In reply to a post by WilliamGrimsley:

Do you know why ADSL at first was so unstable?

Not offhand, no.

It might of been due to using certain frequency bands, or probably at the time we wasn't using twisted pair cables, so it was very prone to noise.

And also the phone line wasn't designed for data / broadband being sent over it.

So I say the latter.

I do also recall then being two separate white / creamish coloured devices, I still have them in my shed

Paul

Ah, I thought it may be that. Thanks for explaining.

And away back 1970s and 1980s, using Acoustic Couplers, some rigid, others flexible-

All in Bauds

110
300
1200/75 - Prince Philip's Account was apparently hacked.
1200

Used to watch the cursor/text position "crawl across the screen"

If I remember correctly, for all eventual working speeds, the initial handshaking was at 110 Baud.

It was about 1988 that I placed my first "on-line" order with Maplin, using one of the first AMSTRAD PCWs, 8256, ("Joyce") bought in October 1985, modified to an 8512 in August 1986.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

Used to watch the cursor/text position "crawl across the screen"

Ye gods. The one I used simply had a teleprinter. You typed on it and it replied.

Agreed, I also used teleprinters and paper tape.

And like my group, you probably wound the shorter lengths of tape in a "bow-tie" or "Figure 8" configuration, across and around thumb and pinkie, similar to cloth tapes in the clothing industry particularly the braiding on uniforms, so that they didn't tangle on going through the readers subsequently.

As the readers got faster, the dangers of paper cuts and burns.

Patching torn tapes with the specially-punched adhesive tapes.

I think folks today would be amazed at the eventual reading speeds, with the tape having to be run in to the large catching boxes after being read, with the subsequent re-winding.

Occasional hand-punching.

One of our team could easily read the tapes - my limit was the "CR-LF" combination.

The continuous "chattering" as the tapes were fed back through the teleprinters, to get a clean print-out, or to a barrel-type lineprinter with its hundreds of hammers.

I could tell when it was still faulty from about 20 feet away by the sounds it made, much to the amazement of the maintenance team, after declaring that it was repaired.

Some of the skills learned were useful when reviving an old player-piano, with its very wide paper tapes. Also using talcum powder as the lubricant on its wooden valving, from using graphite on an early Flight Simulator, Link Mark D.

for several years, we had ICL Termiprinters(?), with ferrite cores at each key.

A colleague had been a touch typist with typical mechanical typewriters, causing her to hit the Termiprinter keys rather hard, resulting in many breakages of the cores.

They were also prone to problems from the static produced by the nylon carpet tiles, so we got in to the habit of emptying the department kettle on them.