[Coco] Reminiscing...

[Joel Ewy]

I remember hooking up to the Wichita Color Computer Club's BBS at 300  baud with a (DCM-3?)/Tandy RS-232 Pak.  I think I actually used  the terminal program built into the RS-232 Pak's ROM for a while.   Not long after I got a 2400 bps modem and got on Delphi as  JOELAV.  That was flyin!  
  
  I agree, there was something truly exciting about reaching out over the  phone lines and moving the hard disk head assemblies of some distant  VAX machine by remote control; picking through the forum messages and  uploaded files, and seeing what treasures other users had left.  I  think that the spareness of the text interface was like a sensory  deprivation chamber, focussing all of one's attention on the keyboard  and screen in anticipation of the ASCII characters coming down that  long pipe.
  
  I really miss the file archives on Delphi.  I used the CoCo, OS-9,  and Amiga archives extensively (or as extensively as I could at 2400  bps on Delphi's 20/20 plan), and I really wish those archives had  somehow been preserved.  The OS-9 archives at rtsi.com are great,  but I know there's a lot that has been lost.
  
  I think the packet networks were called Tymnet and Telenet.
  
  JCE

George's Coco Address <yahoo at dvdplayersonly.com> wrote:   I was just catching up on the coco list and based on the thread about "who 
sold", my thoughts began wandering and came to a wondering about who(here 
today) remembers anything similar to my first connection with the coco world 
via modem.
 I can't remember the dial up company name that gave access to various 
databases and computer systems, such as Compuserve.

 My first encounter with the outside world of computers and specifically, 
coco SIGS, was through this medium.

 It was exciting.
 It was fun.
 It was interesting.
 It was informative.


 It was slow.... Three hundred baud is a real drag. but I didn't know it at 
the time.  That was about as fast as I could read!
 It was plenty fast and I was impressed.

 Downloads didn't take long. Most were NEVER over a few thousand bytes, 
maybe 8K.
 Text files that took an hour to read, would take just a few minutes to 
download. Those files could be more than 10Kbytes.

 A BBS screen full(80X23) would only take about 64 seconds to load at 300 
baud. By the time is was loaded, you already knew what was there.

 It would be fun if someone could poll the group to see what percentage of 
us has....

"been there, done that!"


 I would do this, but I don't know how.


George















I'm waiting  for the 80X23 issue 


-- 
Coco mailing list
Coco at maltedmedia.com
http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco