My first modem was 1200 baud. I remember looking with a jealous eye at my friends USRobotics Courier HST, with its awesome looks and blazing 14.4k speeds. I believe it set him back around $1,200 1989 dollars, or about $2,600 in today's terms. He could download a compressed 1.44MB floppy disk image with the latest Leisure Suit Larry game from one of several exclusive pirate BBS'es in just around 15 minutes (as long as mom didn't pick up the phone). Good times.

USR HST was very robust against phone pick-ups, it would quietly blink and resume working as soon as the annoyed would-be caller replaced the handset!

I spent $400 in hard-earned teenage income on a USR refurb and never felt buyer's remorse.

I totally forgot about this issue with dial-up modems. The good ones would temporarily pause a connection when someone picked up the phone and the cheapos would instantly lose the connection. My family was too poor to afford to phone lines and it made me value time online (also made me have to use the Internet at odd hours when people were unlikely to call the house).

Why would you subject yourself to that? Just have them come over and help you carry your heavy tower and even heavier CRT to LAN at their house, even if it’s a mile away (me and friends literally did this in Fremont, CA - though I believe it might have been a bit less than a mile)

I hosted a LAN party for my friends because I wanted to practice setting up a small network. It’s funny to think that was once semi-challenging.

The “DHCP server” for us was a sheet of paper where you’d write down the IP you were going to ifconfig.

Wingate memories coming back

The pain inflicted when someone had to leave the LAN and the BNC chain had to be broken and reconfigured....

Or... Someone getting totally owned in Doom cracking it and disconnecting a terminator.

Great times.

Not funny. Major PTSD coming back!!!

But then it would take 4 hours to figure out Windows networking in your computer. (Been there done that)

Too hard to get a ride on a random weekday night before any of us could drive :D

Yeah, my parents refused to buy a second line so this is what we did.

We stole an insanely long ethernet cord from school and hung it over our joined back fence. Lag? Ha! Broadband sort of existed then, just not in rural Australia, so we improvised.

When more people got PCs we would just carry our computers around the block. CRTs were not light, the advent of the lighter weight LCD was more pragmatic to us than to most I suspect!

Did you have to reconnect to EarthLink multiple times until it gave you 56k instead of 24 or 32? That was living wild baby!!

We didn't have Earthlink, we would dial the other person's modem directly and play Doom 1v1.

At my high school, our CS lab had two Teletype terminals that were connected to a remote HP minicomputer over 110 baud (that's 10 chars/sec) acoustic couplers/modems. You had to dial the computer's number then put the handset into a foam-lined wooden box and close the lid. To upload a game, like Star Trek, we punched the game onto paper tape while not connected, then fed the paper tape back through once we got connected. Getting a connection could take 10-15 minutes of manually redialing after getting a busy signal because the service was so oversubscribed.

Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.

These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.

When I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends you'd meet at a parking lot and do burnouts.

Were your friends burnouts in O shapes while your burnouts were in a D shape? :)

Roger Wilco

I bet you could have fit both on the same connection.