Kid told me that he just watched “some crazy old movie” about how a kid hacked into NORAD.
The kid was blown away by the modem. For those who don’t know it’s a cradle type dial up modem where you place the (land line) phone on a receiver instead of plugging the computer into the cat4. You could get up to 150 bits per second on one of those bad boys.
That’s about the speed you can read text…it’s why pre-internet sites like BBSes weren’t all flashy, you had to keep it loadable. Actual downloads you would plan overnight and hope you didn’t lose connection. The first big breakthrough was resumable downloading where you left off. Huge.
I have memories of watching pictures back then being transfered by modem. It was one pixel row at a time, being rendered at approximately reading speed. So as a teenager being into hot celebrity girls, I got to watch the image being unveiled during about 3 minutes of watching those pixels appear left to right, one pixel row at a time.
It was cool :)
Oh God am I old now? I never had to use one but know of their existence from said movie.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
phreakmonkey connects to Wikipedia with a 1964 Livermore Labs acoustic modem
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
