[TriLUG] Piece of History

[Jim Ray]

I got up to 26 WPM at 100% accuracy on an IBM Selectric in high school
and college :-) Now, ain't that a man? I never got up to the necessary
60+ WPM to make secretary, though.

HP41CV with magnetic strips rock. I always did feel guilty about that EE
test at NCSU on inverting a matrix.

1. plug in coordinates
2. press go
3. write down answer and get A in 5 min

Too easy.

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
Behalf Of Brian McCullough
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 1:49 AM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Piece of History

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 05:15:52PM -0500, Justis Peters wrote:
> >   
> Greg and Tarus,
> 
> Good to see your names!  It's been too long since we've talked.  I
hope 
> you're both doing well.
> 
> If the two of you are going to play jacks and queens when I have a
king 
> in my hand, I've got to put my cards on the table.  My first modem was

> 300 baud and it plugged into the joystick port on my Atari 800.  When
I 
> later moved to 1200 baud, it was quite refreshing.
> 
> Does anybody have the ace?  Acoustic coupler with less than 300 baud 
> wins the round.  Unless there's a trump card or a joker I've never
heard of.

Darn, I guess it's my turn.  How about an IBM Selectric-based "terminal"
with a 110 or 150 Baud modem built in, and attached to the Telephone
line, with a pair of cups ( acoustic coupler ) that you put the old
black telephone handset into.

I also had a Southwest Tech 6800 for which I had built a homebrew 
"telephone dialer" using a reed relay.  The 300 Baud ( I think ) modem
in this machine had all of the audio bits, but had no way of
manipulating the line on and off hook, so I took a reed relay and a
parallel port, and hey presto.  On and Off hook, and pulse dialling.


Brian


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