The other day, a friend of mine talked about his experience using 1200 baud modem when he started chatting 9 years ago at a private meeting. Most people surprised that there were even a 1200 modem existed and expressed even 14.4 K speed felt slow connections these days. The meeting was a purely for socializing with more humor, but when it came to WWW/internet everyone became a little bit serious to exchange informative tips.

When my friend mentioned that he paid around $200 for 1200 baud modem in 1989, many people said they couldn't believe it and some asked whether there were modems much cheaper than that. He said he was not sure, and he and some people's eyes turned to me asking I should come and speak out my chatting/communication experiences.

I started to saying that I've never thought about it recollectively and would have to think a little by little. And I said I also paid over $200 for 1200 bps Hayes modem in late 80's and a few agreed that they also did that around that time. So that became a fact instantly from a story in doubt. How could we stand that slow connections as we couldn't even stand 14.4 K speed for the Web these days. In those days that was the fastest modem for the general public and I thought that 1200 bps was really fast.

Back in early 80's when Apple was a hot item, 300 bps was introduced and used. There were even few people using computers, so modem was rare. Years later 600 bps modems became a state of the art of the time. How many of you remember it? I can't remeber much about those days and will appreciate any of your recollections.

In 1985, one of my dormmate was working on communication and used modem to connect to the campus server from his dorm room. Using his computer/modem to login to my account on campus was the beginning of home remote communication experience. The response time was way slower than todays' standard, but I managed to login to my account and exhilarated at it.

Although I didn't have home computer at that time, I used UNIX system quite a while from System III. UNIX command write was I frequently use until recently and that was a way to communicate through networking. To connect to Los Alamos, I think, ARPA was a system to be used. I can't remember much about it except that I had to read thick manuals and the response time for login and chatting was very slow.

Several years later when 2400 bps modem was around $200, I bought Hayes one to be surprised at the high speed of it compared to 1200bps one. Yes, it was twice faster than that. Downloading of several hundred Kb DOS based programs cut down into half the time it used to take. Around 90-92, I joined several BBS and spent quite a time on chatting through 2400 bps modem.

Procomm and Iyagi were DOS-based telnet programs which along with 2400 Hayes modem, got me into a new world called communicaiton and remote computation. By connecting to school's UNIX server, I did quite a deal of work at home without waiting long lines and crowded computer lab at school.

At UCLA, campus backbone was connected through bitnet, but when I moved to Berkeley, Berkeley was connected through internet. Changing schools gave me a whole new networking experiences. And now bitnet is gone forever. As a user's point of view, the difference was little except that you have several emails addresses representing bitnet/internet.

Then came 9600data/2400fax modem. I used it for several months, but couldn't take full advantage of the 9600 speed as there were few ISP with 9600 services. I do remember downloading games and chatting with friends in Korea, Taiwan and East Coast saving long distancs phone bills.

When I upgraded whole personal system around spring of 93, I bought internal 14.4K modem for around $200. That was my first internal modem and was from USRobotics. Before that all my modems were from Hayes. Compared to the external modem, the internal one saved lot of desktop space even though there were little activities going on while communicating which made me bored at times.

Even though I had 14.4K modem, my school's host were only available up to 9600 bps maximum. There were two numbers to connect to host, one for 2400 and other 9600/and higher. 9600 bps was really faster than 2400 bps and was angered about the time wasted to use low speed modem like 1200 and 2400. But in other sense, those were the fasted one in those days as I mentioned earlier.

Around '93, the new words like Web, WWW, internet, HTML were circulating around Berkeley campus and there were several seminars on it. I was curious about it, but was not interested in it much. But some of my peers, mentors and friends were kept asking me about it. As a technie, I decided to learn about it to teach my peers and mentors and thought that would be a way to rewarding them as my peers and mentors. Mastering HTML and the concept of WWW/internet was easily grasped.

For my home PC, SCO Unix and FreeBSD existed along with DOS/windows since late 80's, and UUCP was a way to connect to between UNIX sever and UNIX workstation. Around this time, Linux became my choice of Unices and internet SLIP/PPP replaced UUCP for easier configuration.

X-Mosaic was the first WWW graphics browser and seeing pictures was an added fun to communication. But with 14.4 K speed, downloading of pictures took me a while, and I used lynx, which is a text-based WWW brower most of the time. Quite a while, using X-Mosaic on UNIX workstations was a favorite pastime, then Netscape Navigator on Windows 3.11 and Windows 95/NT and Linux thesedays.

From 93-94, WWW/internet exploded as all of you know. My first homepage made in 93 is probably one of the first few thousand homepages ever made in the world. As far as I know, most WWW applications at that time were used by scientists and engineers for the international communication and network collaborations. So there were little junkies in the net. As WWW expands, only junkies expands I think. Unless I'm give a URL to search for it by colleagues, I seldom do Web surfing.

Text-based IRC was a daily ritual for me for a while, but didn't last long. It is still a way to communicate to your friend on the other side of the globe cheaply.

For a past year and a half, InternetPhone and QuickCam/CUSeeme became a new experience. With InternetPhone, you make international communication cheaply. Although both parties need to have faster modem and IPhone, it's still of high quality. As for digital camera, it's still quite a way to go to be practical. Anyway, I enjoy using QuickCam and rationalize that, "One picture of the other party I'm talking to is better than nothing at all".

I used to pay around $200 for the personal modem, which allowed me go well ahead of most computer users, even though there were cheaper ones available. With that price range today, 56 Kbps is the choice. But not many ISP's are ready for that yet.

Most of the above are things of the past, which very few people remembers. Until I was asked to talk about it, those were stashed even in my memories. (4-5-97)