36 Years and 1800 Issues of TidBITS

[mschmitt (Michael Schmitt)]

@Shamino

PC serial ports could always go up to 115,200 bps, but the 8250 UART typically used at the time only has a 1 byte buffer, so at high bit-rates (anything above 9600), software often couldn’t keep up, causing characters to get dropped.

AT&K3 for the win?

What was the typical modem speed back then? I think I was using a 300 bps modem to connect my original Macintosh to a BBS.

[Shamino (David C.)]

@mschmitt

What was the typical modem speed back then?

With respect to the standards, the release dates for the most popular data rates were:

• 1962: Bell 103 / V.21 (300 bps)
• 1980: Bell 212A (1200 bps)
• 1984: V.22bis (2400 bps)
• 1984: V.32 (9600 bps)
• 1991: V.32bis (14.4K)
• 1994: V.34 (28.8K)
• 1996: V.34 (33.6K)
• 1998: V.90 (56K)
• 2000: V.92 (56K)

But with respect to what was popular and was used by normal human beings, the world was mostly 300 bps in 1984, with some people running at 1200.

When I started college in 1987, 1200 bps was cheap and common, and 2400 bps was not too expensive.

And everybody was running at 2400 from then until until dial-up Internet became a thing in the mid-90’s, when everybody started buying 14.4K and faster modems pretty much as fast as they were invented.

But all that having been said, serial ports were used for a lot more than modems. Even in the PC world, they were used for printers, plotters, and for connecting to hard-wired connections to servers (especially in business and academic environments). And for those uses, people wanted to drive the lines as fast as possible, with 9600 bps being a minimum, and faster speeds whenever possible.

h/t Wikipedia and the Linux Modem HOWTO file.

[Matt_McCaffrey]

@mschmitt

They didn’t need other ports because they included the new and fantastically fast RS-422A serial ports, which could run up to 230 kbps or even 1 mbps with an external clock. (Compared to RS-232 on PCs that maxed out at 92 kbps.*)

Oh, man, that’s right!

I bought my first modem for my Mac SE in a parking lot, literally. A friend hooked me up with a guy who met me in a parking lot in Cambridge, I handed him $75 cash, and he handed me a bag with a box, a power adapter, and a RS-232 cable. 1200-baud, and it seemed light-years faster than the 300-baud modem on the Commodore-64 I had owned previously.

Also:

• I presume it was not stolen, but surplus.
• I hope nearly 50 years later that I can chalk up that presumption to youthful naivete.

@mschmitt

The February 1984 issue of BYTE magazine had An Interview: The Macintosh Design Team which discussed their reasoning. Here’s a link to the text from the interview: BYTE Interview with the Creators of the Macintosh from 1984.

And (weirdly), I was subscribing to BYTE at that time and I had a vague glimmering recollection of the article, or another one like it. Thanks for the link!

[ulf (Ulf Dittmer)]

It’s got to have been 1991, which is when I got internet access through college. Back then they came as HyperCard stacks, but I’m not sure how I would have got them - possibly through the Info-Mac archive?

[james.cutler (James R Cutler)]

My earliest mailsteward record from listmanager@tidbits.com is dated December 2007. That is probably later that actually reading started. I my TidiBITS award says I joined in April of 2018. MacInTouch also had been part of my regular reading. Sometime around 2022 or so I also discovered Howard Oakley’s eclecticlight.co – I was able to quit spending time developing shell coded tools and use Howard’s tools instead. My TidBITS usage is pretty general. Eclecticlight.co is home to heavy discussions of macOS betas and art history. I have been know to contribute to both on occasion.

My external memory for such events is in my local Mail archives and, recently, Mailsteward. I am often astonished at the supportive appreciation of my efforts by TidBITS users. I have been doing this kind of activity for so many years that I find fascination with occasional retrospective looks at my history.

[TBTdn (David)]

I looked in my last MBPro which contains sent email back to 2002 (not sure where I have older mail) and found a Dec 2005 email to friends in which I recommended an e-book from tidbits and mentioned that I found the site useful so I must have been already at least a fan by then, so at least more than half the run of TB!

My G4 iMac and another MBPro I had used before were at some point converted for my wife’s use so my email on those must be on a backup drive somewhere. I thought I had dragged my whole email history (much more portable than file cabinets of paper letters) through various software/hardware changes but apparently not.