Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/16/19 4:26 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: :-o *Wow.* Did you at least compare it to NT? No. The machines were donated, they had the '98 OEM sticker on them, it kept everything legal. Seeing as how this was for a school, everything worked, and was stable for months at a time, we had no reason to change it. I had experience with NT 4.0 prior to that. But I / we felt no compulsion to change. I had NT boxes with uptimes of months with no special effort. 9x crashed if you gave it a stern look. In the trade we called it GameOS at the time. As a workstation, yes, '98 could be unstable. I have no idea how often they would reboot the workstations. But the server stayed up for weeks to months at a time. There was also the advantage that the server was the same as the workstations. Meaning that a teacher could do things on the server if they needed to. (I lived about an hour away.) Was it great or the best? Probably not. Did it work well enough? Yes. Did it fulfill their needs? Yes. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Sat, 15 Jun 2019 at 00:36, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > > I too had a soft spot for Windows 98 Second Edition. I ran it for a > LONG time. > > I found it quite stable and used it for a server for a school in '99-'00 > before putting a Linux box in place the following year. > > They had 98SE, it worked, and I was able to get it stable for a lab of > ~20 other 98SE machines. :-o *Wow.* Did you at least compare it to NT? I had NT boxes with uptimes of months with no special effort. 9x crashed if you gave it a stern look. In the trade we called it GameOS at the time. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/14/19 7:21 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: I am astonished. I never found 98SE a stable or reliable OS and was glad to get rid of it. I too had a soft spot for Windows 98 Second Edition. I ran it for a LONG time. I found it quite stable and used it for a server for a school in '99-'00 before putting a Linux box in place the following year. They had 98SE, it worked, and I was able to get it stable for a lab of ~20 other 98SE machines. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Fri, 14 Jun 2019 at 14:53, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote: > > I was speaking from a user's perspective; I never did much coding under > Windows (well, a fair amount under Cygwin, using only the portable I/O > library, but that's not really _Windows_ programming). Well, me too. I don't really program anything any more and haven't since the end of the 1980s. > From that perspective, 98SE was the sweet spot for me (I don't have any > reliability issues, with the configs I run). I do have some XP machines, > and the Windows 10 laptop, but most of mine run 98SE. I am astonished. I never found 98SE a stable or reliable OS and was glad to get rid of it. I keep DOS boot partitions around on some of my machines. E.g. my testbed Thinkpad X200 has a bootable primary IBM PC DOS 7.1 (not 7.01) primary partition. (The others contain A2, Haiku and Devuan.) But the recent kit mostly has Win10 around, just in case I need to reflash a BIOS or root a phone or something. I never normally use it -- they run Ubuntu normally -- but it's there if I need it. (After an hour of installing updates, anyway.) -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
> From: Liam Proven > There was a certain simplicity and understandability about Win9x, > yes, but NT was far more reliable, even back in the NT 3 era. .. > So I moved to NT as soon as my kit could run it, and never looked > back. I was speaking from a user's perspective; I never did much coding under Windows (well, a fair amount under Cygwin, using only the portable I/O library, but that's not really _Windows_ programming). >From that perspective, 98SE was the sweet spot for me (I don't have any reliability issues, with the configs I run). I do have some XP machines, and the Windows 10 laptop, but most of mine run 98SE. Noel
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 at 20:33, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote: > > Great rant. :-D Thanks! > I myself much prefer my Windows98 machines to my Windows 10 laptop, which > I had to buy because i) many Web sites won't work without the latest and > greatest browser (in many cases because of the nitwitted craze for not > just HTTPS, but the latest and greatest security option for it - but let > me not get derailed into that rant into lemming-like stupidity), and those > are only available for the latest and greated bloatware OS. Wow. Well, I strongly agree on bloatware OSes and that, but I'm not so sure about Win9x, especially 98SE, which I regarded as quite bloated for the 9x series myself! I did run 95 from choice for a brief time. I moved from Acorn RISC OS to OS/2 2 on my home computer, in pre-internet times. It did me fine for some years, although I failed to get Warp 3 to install -- my kit at the time was very low-end: a laptop with onboard SCSI, a 486DX/50 (*not* DX2, the rare full-speed 50MHz 486) with 8MB of RAM, a ProHance PowerMouse (also an external keypad) and a Logitech SoundMan parallel-port sound card. Warp 3 didn't work with the SoundMan or the PowerMouse or my SVGA driver (800*600 in 16-bit colour), all of which worked on Warp 2 -- after I had _bought_ the drivers. Then I got a slightly newer machine from work -- a cast-off 486DX2/66 Gateway desktop. The hardware was now a bit too new for OS/2 2 and yet not new enough for Warp 3, so I fell between two stools. I tried a beta copy of Windows Chicago and was amazed at how well it worked, even Just Worked™. Parallel-port kit, SCSI cards, whatever -- if there wasn't a Win95 driver, a DOS driver would usually do. It had proper internal sound card, proper SVGA graphics, an ATAPI CD-ROM, and Win95 just worked with all of it. No editing CONFIG.SYS, no additional drivers, no modifying the boot disk so you could install the OS already aware of your new kit. It was a dream of simplicity and functionality compared to OS/2, I'm sorry to say. So I switched. And my flatmate had a PC too, so we networked them over a parallel cable so we could play Doom against each other. Home Ethernet was still fanciful for me in 1995. A bit later, my home cast-off PC got upgraded to a Pentium/90 and I switched to NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and I never used 9x (or OS/2) as my main OS on my desktop again. I did run it on my laptops until about 2001, though. I didn't like 98's built-in IE, IE-based desktop and things like that, and customised it to remove that stuff with 98Lite for years. But 98 supported lots of IP addresses, which became useful. 95 supported a maximum of 4, and with a modem, PCMCIA Ethernet, Firewire and a direct-cable-connection link all configured, that was it. No new IP connections for you. There was a certain simplicity and understandability about Win9x, yes, but NT was far more reliable, even back in the NT 3 era. DOS and 16-bit apps worked. Drivers, no. So I moved to NT as soon as my kit could run it, and never looked back. Until XP, which was a bit bloated for me, so around 2002 I started exploring full-time Linux and Mac OS X as viable alternatives. I'd been dabbling with Linux for years but mainly as a server or firewall, not as a desktop. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
> From: Liam Proven > Now, my tablet and iPhone and Android phones need *at least* 3 or 4 > apps updating every day. ... The OS needs to be replaced every month > or two to fix all the flaws in it, and that's a gigabyte or so of > storage. > I am *furious* about this. > ... > I had a better *phone* and a better *PDA* 20 years ago. Great rant. I myself much prefer my Windows98 machines to my Windows 10 laptop, which I had to buy because i) many Web sites won't work without the latest and greatest browser (in many cases because of the nitwitted craze for not just HTTPS, but the latest and greatest security option for it - but let me not get derailed into that rant into lemming-like stupidity), and those are only available for the latest and greated bloatware OS. Noel
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 22:57, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote: > > I share the sentiment and I guess I could give similar description > (yours was very interesting, BTW). Thank you! > If I had a privilege to own > Psion. But, when I went on for shopping, Psion was already bowing out > of the PDA market. So I bought Compaq iPAQ 3630, installed Familiar > Linux on it and hoped there would be a future when PDAs can be > bought. Hoho, I was so wrong. But while researching, I could on one > ocassion tap a bit on this excellent Psion 5mx keyboard in a shop. I > think about this keyboard to this very day. Nothing ever was better and fitted in your pocket. *Nothing*. > About displays: my ideal display was the one from iPAQ (they were also > used in other handheld PDAs of the time). It was called transflective > LCD. They are easily recognized, because the light can be permamently > turned off. "Normal" LCD has a backlight, i.e. a layer of > leds/incandescents which shine through from the back of the display > towards the user. Transflectives have special reflective layer in the > back, and a diode on a side. The external light reflects and shines > back through the crystal layer. Sorry for laymanish description, but I > hope I have got it right. > > Anyway, such display looked best in full sun. The one in 3630 could > display 4096 colors (with spectrum slightly bent towards pinky). Later > iPAQ models could do 65k colors (again slightly bent, but this time > much less visible). I used mine PDA as a proto ebook reader, lots of > html and pdb material read outdoors. The same kind of LCD was to be > found in many phones. Fascinating. I did not know transreflective LCDs were in PDAs. I only knew of them from the One Laptop Per Child project. There was an attempt to "productize" them as Pixel Qi but it died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi > For whatever reason, morons decided the shiny LCD should be next best > thing. And transflective got lost. Just like this. Nada. Appears like > the very meaning of "mobile" changed during last twenty years - first > it meant "outdoors" and now it means "from one couch to another, > indoors". A tragic loss for all of us. Triple-layer transmissive LCDs are a terrible bodge of a technology, and it is only because they are so bad that things like OLED look like good alternatives. But since it is all that anyone knows now, we think they are great. > Twenty years ago people using such tech were easily falling into > "elite users" of some kind. Either because of earnings or because they > had nontrivial needs and were decided to satisfy them - and the > machines reflected this. Not so with todays users, and again, machines > reflect this. Yes, true. > I am rather baffled whenever I read Psion had milion users and yet > this was not enough for them. Plenty of people would consider > themselves lucky if their books, cars or games were bought by this > many. The attitude of Psion managers is totally disgusting for me, > unless I had not taken something into account. Agreed. This is something Planet Computers understands and I hope that it continues to. > Perhaps niche technical products should be sold by those who > understand niche markets. I imagine that if I came to manager of niche > recording label and suggested he should get rid of musicians and start > recording some generic crap outsourced from other side of the world to > "reduce costs" I guess I would fly out the window with his boot in my > arse. In contrast, I imagine that coming with similar proposition to > manager of huge (so called) tech firm I would get a bl**job and some > of his shares. But maybe I am romantic. :-D Excellent comparison! -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 01:43:40PM +0200, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 20:06, Fred Cisin via cctalk > wrote: > > > > I don't think that my Fossil (Palm-OS WATCH) does IRDA. > > I should find somebody who will pay me money for such a piece of > > crap^H^H^H^H NEAT technology. > [...] > > Now? No keyboards at all. > > No, I am not happy about that, either. > > I could read the screens of my Psion and Nokia in bright sunshine. > American-design ones are slowly edging back towards that, but it's > still difficult. Daylight-readable screens have disappeared from the > market. > > I'm not happy about that, either. > > My Psions and Nokias had bulletproof OSes that lasted for years > without a single update, and yes, they were Internet-connected by the > last few generations. They ran in a few tens of megabytes of > nonvolatile storage. > > Now, my tablet and iPhone and Android phones need *at least* 3 or 4 > apps updating every day. If I don't use one for a few weeks, it's just > like Windows -- I have to do half an hour of updates before I can use > it. The OS needs to be replaced every month or two to fix all the > flaws in it, and that's a gigabyte or so of storage. > > I am *furious* about this. I share the sentiment and I guess I could give similar description (yours was very interesting, BTW). If I had a privilege to own Psion. But, when I went on for shopping, Psion was already bowing out of the PDA market. So I bought Compaq iPAQ 3630, installed Familiar Linux on it and hoped there would be a future when PDAs can be bought. Hoho, I was so wrong. But while researching, I could on one ocassion tap a bit on this excellent Psion 5mx keyboard in a shop. I think about this keyboard to this very day. About displays: my ideal display was the one from iPAQ (they were also used in other handheld PDAs of the time). It was called transflective LCD. They are easily recognized, because the light can be permamently turned off. "Normal" LCD has a backlight, i.e. a layer of leds/incandescents which shine through from the back of the display towards the user. Transflectives have special reflective layer in the back, and a diode on a side. The external light reflects and shines back through the crystal layer. Sorry for laymanish description, but I hope I have got it right. Anyway, such display looked best in full sun. The one in 3630 could display 4096 colors (with spectrum slightly bent towards pinky). Later iPAQ models could do 65k colors (again slightly bent, but this time much less visible). I used mine PDA as a proto ebook reader, lots of html and pdb material read outdoors. The same kind of LCD was to be found in many phones. For whatever reason, morons decided the shiny LCD should be next best thing. And transflective got lost. Just like this. Nada. Appears like the very meaning of "mobile" changed during last twenty years - first it meant "outdoors" and now it means "from one couch to another, indoors". > "The JesusPhone, I swear it is smiling at me: Come to me. come to me > and be saved. The luscious curves, the polished glissade of the icons > in the multi-touch interface - whoever designed that thing is an > intuitive illusionist, I realise fuzzily as my fingertip closes in on > the screen: That's at least a class five glamour." > (Charles Stross, /The Fuller Memorandum/) > > They're very shiny. They do a lot. > > But I had a better *phone* and a better *PDA* 20 years ago. The whole > is much less than the sum of its parts. Twenty years ago people using such tech were easily falling into "elite users" of some kind. Either because of earnings or because they had nontrivial needs and were decided to satisfy them - and the machines reflected this. Not so with todays users, and again, machines reflect this. I am rather baffled whenever I read Psion had milion users and yet this was not enough for them. Plenty of people would consider themselves lucky if their books, cars or games were bought by this many. The attitude of Psion managers is totally disgusting for me, unless I had not taken something into account. Perhaps niche technical products should be sold by those who understand niche markets. I imagine that if I came to manager of niche recording label and suggested he should get rid of musicians and start recording some generic crap outsourced from other side of the world to "reduce costs" I guess I would fly out the window with his boot in my arse. In contrast, I imagine that coming with similar proposition to manager of huge (so called) tech firm I would get a bl**job and some of his shares. But maybe I am romantic. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bi
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 15:51, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote: > > Adding pockets ruins the look, or something. Yup. They're going beyond the realm of their own previous products into such severe minimalism it's becoming inconvenient. I want an LED to tell me my charge/power status, message status, etc., thank you. I want a physical home button. I want a physical headphone socket. If you want me to buy a £1000 tablet, then I want multiple ports, USB and Lightning or whatever. I want to connect a keyboard and headphones and charge it all at once, thanks. Since I can't have that, I bought a cheapo Chinese tablet instead, for less than the cost of a second-hand iPad of similar spec. It does the job. It is very pleasant that I have come to a point in my life where I can afford nice toys like a (second-hand) Retina iMac and what was still a high-end iPhone when I got it (also 2nd hand). However, so many features are disappearing from the newer models that I am not sure they're going to keep me for long... -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Mon, 10 Jun 2019 at 15:45, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote: > > So long as said companies don't just make yet another Android device based on > a > cheap-and-nasty Mediatek SOC which requires proprietary Android-only drivers > to > work well, and then make misleading claims about Linux support. Don't all phone chipsets require Android drivers? And on that point, so does the RasPi. > The Gemini's keyboard was very much a take-my-money-now feature when I saw it, > but since it was being crowdfunded on Indiegogo, the platform for stuff too > dodgy for Kickstarter, I decided to exercise caution and wait to see what, if > anything, would be delivered. When they finally admitted it had a Mediatek > chipset, I lost all interest. Been there, done that, never again. You pays your money, etc. I'm quite happy with mine. I don't use it as a phone but for taking notes at conferences and events, for instance, it's _superb_. > Planet are right now crowdfunding their new "Cosmo Communicator". They have > apparently learned nothing as it also has a Mediatek chipset, and yet they > continue to disingenuously claim Linux support. I shall be giving this one a > wide berth too. On their sales volumes, I think they have to go with whatever is cheap and customisable on the Chinese market. One of the sad things about the ARM market is that there is no industry standard, no baseline to aim for. There isn't even standard firmware. Lots of devices don't have firmware at all, so every Linux port is a bare-metal thing, starting with hardware initialisation. A year or 2 after it goes off the market, it's junk, as nothing will support it any more. ARM64 is trying to impose a requirement for UEFI, I believe, but [a] the legions of cheap kit makers don't care and just ignore it, and [b] UEFI is horrible. > Third time lucky, eh? Maybe they should start talking to the Raspberry Pi > people who actually know a thing or two about getting Linux working well on > mobile chipsets. Via big binary BLOBs, yeah, and a weird bootloader that means that the GPU initialises the system and (I hear) retains some degree of control over interrupts, making it more or less impossible to run a proper hypervisor on the things. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 01:58:53PM +0200, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: [...] > Agreed again. My old Mac mini had a power LED. It pulsed softly when asleep. > The iMac that has replaced it has nothing. I can't tell if it is on, > off, asleep or what. > The cost saving of this change must be too small to measure. :-) Adding pockets ruins the look, or something. They're not even charging "only" £54.99 for a Thunderbolt-to-power-LED dongle, so this particular essential component wasn't removed for the usual reason.
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 01:57:34PM +0200, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: [...] > I just wish a few more companies thought like Planet Computers and tried to > make devices for rich niches, rather than the cheap mass market... > https://planetcom.squarespace.com/ So long as said companies don't just make yet another Android device based on a cheap-and-nasty Mediatek SOC which requires proprietary Android-only drivers to work well, and then make misleading claims about Linux support. The Gemini's keyboard was very much a take-my-money-now feature when I saw it, but since it was being crowdfunded on Indiegogo, the platform for stuff too dodgy for Kickstarter, I decided to exercise caution and wait to see what, if anything, would be delivered. When they finally admitted it had a Mediatek chipset, I lost all interest. Been there, done that, never again. Planet are right now crowdfunding their new "Cosmo Communicator". They have apparently learned nothing as it also has a Mediatek chipset, and yet they continue to disingenuously claim Linux support. I shall be giving this one a wide berth too. Third time lucky, eh? Maybe they should start talking to the Raspberry Pi people who actually know a thing or two about getting Linux working well on mobile chipsets.
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Sun, 9 Jun 2019 at 13:49, Stefan Skoglund wrote: > > I also hate my samsung a5 mobile - the stupid thing > doesnt have something which the two ericsson mobiles i used before (and > a nokia and i believe a samsung to) had. > > Namely a small led which was on all the time. A great thing when > you need to look for the damn things while it is dark. > > For example in the car or in bed or out in the nature inside a tent. > > Stupid little things... > > that little led usually changed colour when the battery became low. Agreed again. My old Mac mini had a power LED. It pulsed softly when asleep. The iMac that has replaced it has nothing. I can't tell if it is on, off, asleep or what. The cost saving of this change must be too small to measure. :-) -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Sun, 9 Jun 2019 at 13:45, Stefan Skoglund wrote: > > The economist wrote about this ( > https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/06/08/how-the-pursuit-of-leisure-drives-internet-use > ) > > The current situation is this: > it is much more important for Apple and Samsung to sell overpriced > things to consumers which then basically only will be used to play > games, look on sport games and youtube films. Fair point. And in the tropics, it is more important than ever that a device is sealed, waterproof, has no moving parts, etc. -- to keep it tough. Cheap & replaceable are more important than convenient and repairable. > What you used the Psion for will only sell about 4 percent of apples > volumes last year > The screen of the machine i write this on, stands on a sun sparcstation > 10. > If i had that machine running well i would be as productive writing > reports on that one as on the asus tower which i now uses. I know what you mean, and I agree. I just wish a few more companies thought like Planet Computers and tried to make devices for rich niches, rather than the cheap mass market... https://planetcom.squarespace.com/ -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
tor 2019-06-06 klockan 13:43 +0200 skrev Liam Proven via cctalk: > On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 20:06, Fred Cisin via cctalk > wrote: > > I don't think that my Fossil (Palm-OS WATCH) does IRDA. > > I should find somebody who will pay me money for such a piece of > > crap^H^H^H^H NEAT technology. > I also hate my samsung a5 mobile - the stupid thing doesnt have something which the two ericsson mobiles i used before (and a nokia and i believe a samsung to) had. Namely a small led which was on all the time. A great thing when you need to look for the damn things while it is dark. For example in the car or in bed or out in the nature inside a tent. Stupid little things... that little led usually changed colour when the battery became low.
Re: Modems and external dialers.
tor 2019-06-06 klockan 13:43 +0200 skrev Liam Proven via cctalk: > > Result of the eventual convergence on the American model: > > We have amazingly sophisticated, high-spec smartphones and tablets, > but they have a battery life of a single day, replacing European > phones that lasted a week and PDAs that lasted a month. > > Why, no, I am *not* happy about that. > > The European PDAs had excellent keyboards you could type on. My Psion > 5MX paid for itself in the first weekend of ownership: on a > long-distance coach with a fold-down table the size of an iPad, I > wrote 2 articles, both of which I sold and which paid for the device. > > The economist wrote about this ( https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/06/08/how-the-pursuit-of-leisure-drives-internet-use ) The current situation is this: it is much more important for Apple and Samsung to sell overpriced things to consumers which then basically only will be used to play games, look on sport games and youtube films. What you used the Psion for will only sell about 4 percent of apples volumes last year The screen of the machine i write this on, stands on a sun sparcstation 10. If i had that machine running well i would be as productive writing reports on that one as on the asus tower which i now uses.
Re: Palm usage was Re: Modems and external dialers.
You know I miss (A LOT) Palm desktop simplicity!? Wish I could have the same functionality on my android phone. Everything was SO simple and straightforward... ---8<---Corte aqui---8<--- http://www.tabajara-labs.blogspot.com http://www.tabalabs.com.br ---8<---Corte aqui---8<--- Em qui, 6 de jun de 2019 às 14:45, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> escreveu: > > > ...I was never a big fan > > > of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the > > > Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a > > > way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you > > > in your pocket. > > > > Interesting view of Palm usage that I hadn't considered. > > > > > I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. > > > > Nor did I. When I carried a Palm Pilot every day, I was using UNIX > > 'mail' for work e-mail and did all local edits of my calendar on the > > Palm. I did backup my Palm Pilot, to my Linux Laptop (I still have > > backups files from 1999 in an archive folder). > > Not sure if this counts as "connected" but I used Palm Desktop itself for > my personal scheduling. I never used my Palms (an m505 and a Zire 72) for > E-mail, though. It did mostly note-taking, calendar and pharmacy work, and > some programming (in Plua). > > -- > personal: > http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- > Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * > ckai...@floodgap.com > -- If elected, I will win. -- Pat Paulsen for President > --- >
Re: Palm usage was Re: Modems and external dialers.
I was curious about the opinion and reply :-) Sent from my Apple /c >> >> Cameron, how did you like Plua and what did you do with it? >> > > Oops, sorry for sending this out to the list
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 19:55, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > > I used my Palm(s) completely stand-alone. > I did not "synchronize" them with PC, other than a token backup to confirm > process. And I never used it as a peripheral to the PC. > I did transfer a few files back and forth between Palm and PC; for > example, for a conference, I copied a file with the conference schedule > to the Palm. > > I used the Fossil (Palm-OS) VERY briefly, in the same way. The watchband > on it is still new and stiff. I am boggling. Well, perhaps this is an intercontinental difference, or perhaps I just had it wrong. For most of the users I know, it was a pocketable version of their Outlook calendar and address book. > I used Atari Portfolio and Poqet a bit. AND, when I needed to research > and learn TSRs, I did so on them! Poqet was MS-DOS 5.00. Portfolio was > imitation-DOS, but close enough that they had implemented the undocumented > calls that TSRs used. I wrote the [text-mode] screen capture TSR for > XenoFont on them. (For a while, Sybex used the screen capture and > screen printing routines of XenoFont for all of their text-mode books. > Then, I wrote the XenoSoft Sales Tax Genie on the Poqet. > > Yes, I tested everything on CGA, MDA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, 286, 386, 486, > Pentium. But why bother using those on 80x86 projects that were not > performance intensive? Nothing becomes USELESS just because there now > exists something bigger and faster. Well, no, of course not. That's sort of why we're all here. I still use DOS occasionally -- usually DR-DOS or PC DOS, for me. For some things, such as word processing, it's still fine. But whereas I know people who use Mutt/Neomutt/Alpine, I want a GUI for my email these days, for instance. > I used the OQOs (XP) extensively for email and web browsing. (Before > Android smartphones) I used my Nokia Communicator for that. :-) Small enough to use with 1 hand, when closed it was a decent "candybar" phone, but open, I could read a letterbox-sized slice of an A4 PDF page comfortable. > Until presbyopia did me in, I had no problem with tiny screens, if they > had enough resolution. I could read microfilm without a viewer, and could > easily see the grain in photos. When the ophthalmalogist asked me to read > the smallest line on the eye chart, he had to walk over to it before he > would believe me that it said, "Copyright Bausch and Lomb". Now, I can't > even read printed text without at least +2.5 :-( I live in some fear of this, and it's why I have not had laser eye surgery. (Adding the erroneous hyphen makes it sound much more exciting: laser-eye surgery.) I still have good close-up vision, at 51, but I have to hold stuff within a few inches of my nose to do it. If/when that goes, either LASIK or a cataract op will be high on the list > I would hope that the keyboard for Palm would at least use Grafiti font > for its keycaps:-) :-o I have 2 of them and I have to disappoint you. :-D -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 19:30, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > Most of the Palm users I knew, myself included, used their Palm largely > stand alone. Almost all of us backed up (synced) our device to our > computers as a backup in case of device corruption. Some of us did use > Palm Desktop as a convenient interface (PIM) to what was on our palms. > But the Palm was largely stand alone. > > I did know a few people that synced with Outlook (and other things). > > The person that introduced me to Palms and I did play with network based > syncing and had it working reliably at work. Remarkable. Well, perhaps I had it all wrong all this time! > I found myself, along with a few other Palm users, using Graffiti on > paper, because it was faster than traditional letters. :-o Shorthand, yes. But Graffiti... I have to ask. How is your cursive/longhand? When I sent Palm owners contact info, some protested that my contacts were _too full_ with _too much info_ -- home and work address, multiple phone numbers, home and work emails, birthdays, partners/kids' names, etc. Their devices handled it but the owners couldn't. Palm owners entered the bare minimum of contact info, because data entry was so painful. This was one of the virtues of having a good keyboard, of course. I knew one chap who tried to write a novel on his Palm device, but for most, it was kept as short as possible. I wrote many tens of thousands of words on my Psions -- they were a primary working device. I took my new Gemini PDA to the FOSDEM FOSS conference in Brussels back in February. Tried using it instead of a notebook PC for note-taking. It was _far_ better. A tenth of the size or weight, but as fast to type on, perfectly comfortable and convenient. And enough battery life for a weekend of use without a charge. The Psion keyboard at least lives on and is still relevant today. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Palm usage was Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 2:40 PM Eric Christopherson < echristopher...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 12:45 PM Cameron Kaiser via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > >> Not sure if this counts as "connected" but I used Palm Desktop itself for >> my personal scheduling. I never used my Palms (an m505 and a Zire 72) for >> E-mail, though. It did mostly note-taking, calendar and pharmacy work, and >> some programming (in Plua). >> > > Cameron, how did you like Plua and what did you do with it? I remember > downloading it and running a few very simple things with it. I had been > looking for Python or Ruby at the time, but happened across that and > thought Lua seemed like an interesting language too. Sadly, I never got > around to learning it, though. > Oops, sorry for sending this out to the list even though I changed the subject line to indicate that it was offlist! -- Eric Christopherson
Plua - Offlist reply (Re: Palm usage was Re: Modems and external dialers.)
On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 12:45 PM Cameron Kaiser via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > ...I was never a big fan > > > of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the > > > Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a > > > way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you > > > in your pocket. > > > > Interesting view of Palm usage that I hadn't considered. > > > > > I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. > > > > Nor did I. When I carried a Palm Pilot every day, I was using UNIX > > 'mail' for work e-mail and did all local edits of my calendar on the > > Palm. I did backup my Palm Pilot, to my Linux Laptop (I still have > > backups files from 1999 in an archive folder). > > Not sure if this counts as "connected" but I used Palm Desktop itself for > my personal scheduling. I never used my Palms (an m505 and a Zire 72) for > E-mail, though. It did mostly note-taking, calendar and pharmacy work, and > some programming (in Plua). > Cameron, how did you like Plua and what did you do with it? I remember downloading it and running a few very simple things with it. I had been looking for Python or Ruby at the time, but happened across that and thought Lua seemed like an interesting language too. Sadly, I never got around to learning it, though. (I think my first exposure to Lua was through tomsrtbt, which I ran on an old Compaq laptop; many of its scripts were in Lua. I think I read that that let them be compact and still expressive. But after messing with that system and not knowing my way around the scripts, I forgot about Lua until I found Plua.) -- Eric Christopherson
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, 6 Jun 2019, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Wow. I have never heard anyone using one [Palm] so stand-alone. Fascinating. Thanks! I used my Palm(s) completely stand-alone. I did not "synchronize" them with PC, other than a token backup to confirm process. And I never used it as a peripheral to the PC. I did transfer a few files back and forth between Palm and PC; for example, for a conference, I copied a file with the conference schedule to the Palm. I used the Fossil (Palm-OS) VERY briefly, in the same way. The watchband on it is still new and stiff. I used Atari Portfolio and Poqet a bit. AND, when I needed to research and learn TSRs, I did so on them! Poqet was MS-DOS 5.00. Portfolio was imitation-DOS, but close enough that they had implemented the undocumented calls that TSRs used. I wrote the [text-mode] screen capture TSR for XenoFont on them. (For a while, Sybex used the screen capture and screen printing routines of XenoFont for all of their text-mode books. Then, I wrote the XenoSoft Sales Tax Genie on the Poqet. Yes, I tested everything on CGA, MDA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, 286, 386, 486, Pentium. But why bother using those on 80x86 projects that were not performance intensive? Nothing becomes USELESS just because there now exists something bigger and faster. I used the OQOs (XP) extensively for email and web browsing. (Before Android smartphones) Until presbyopia did me in, I had no problem with tiny screens, if they had enough resolution. I could read microfilm without a viewer, and could easily see the grain in photos. When the ophthalmalogist asked me to read the smallest line on the eye chart, he had to walk over to it before he would believe me that it said, "Copyright Bausch and Lomb". Now, I can't even read printed text without at least +2.5 I would hope that the keyboard for Palm would at least use Grafiti font for its keycaps:-) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Palm usage was Re: Modems and external dialers.
> > ...I was never a big fan > > of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the > > Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a > > way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you > > in your pocket. > > Interesting view of Palm usage that I hadn't considered. > > > I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. > > Nor did I. When I carried a Palm Pilot every day, I was using UNIX > 'mail' for work e-mail and did all local edits of my calendar on the > Palm. I did backup my Palm Pilot, to my Linux Laptop (I still have > backups files from 1999 in an archive folder). Not sure if this counts as "connected" but I used Palm Desktop itself for my personal scheduling. I never used my Palms (an m505 and a Zire 72) for E-mail, though. It did mostly note-taking, calendar and pharmacy work, and some programming (in Plua). -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- If elected, I will win. -- Pat Paulsen for President ---
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/6/19 11:24 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: Wow. I have never heard anyone using one so stand-alone. Fascinating. Thanks! Most of the Palm users I knew, myself included, used their Palm largely stand alone. Almost all of us backed up (synced) our device to our computers as a backup in case of device corruption. Some of us did use Palm Desktop as a convenient interface (PIM) to what was on our palms. But the Palm was largely stand alone. I did know a few people that synced with Outlook (and other things). The person that introduced me to Palms and I did play with network based syncing and had it working reliably at work. I did learn Graffiti -- on a Newton, at first -- but I found it slow and clunky. I found myself, along with a few other Palm users, using Graffiti on paper, because it was faster than traditional letters. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, 6 Jun 2019 at 18:47, Ethan Dicks wrote: > > Interesting view of Palm usage that I hadn't considered. > > > I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. > > Nor did I. When I carried a Palm Pilot every day, I was using UNIX > 'mail' for work e-mail and did all local edits of my calendar on the > Palm. I did backup my Palm Pilot, to my Linux Laptop (I still have > backups files from 1999 in an archive folder). Wow. I have never heard anyone using one so stand-alone. Fascinating. Thanks! > What I used mine for was [...] > > The Palm was definitely more battery hungry. NEC V30 at 7.68 MHz, apparently. I guess it was a more frugal chip, and certainly a very frugal OS. Psion *nearly* did a deal with Palm to licence EPOC32 as the basis for the newer ARM-based Palms. I wish that had happened -- it might have been a much better deal than what did happen for both companies. > Eventually, I got a used Palm V to recharge in the cradle. I also got > an app to migrate some apps to internal Flash so I wouldn't have to > reload them when my battery did go flat. I have one somewhere, but I think it won't charge any more. I should look into cheap repairs. > I _did_ like carrying around a 68000-based portable machine in a day > when laptops were thick and heavy and had abysmal battery life. I can see that, certainly. > I > didn't have a mobile phone for the first several years I had a Palm. > Later, when I got a phone, it made phone calls and that was it. Ditto for me. > Co-workers did experiment with the Palm Treo phone, but that was far > too expensive for me to consider. I reviewed an "HP OmniGo 700LKX" with docked Nokia. http://www.tankraider.com/DOSPALMTOP/hp700lx.html That was an amazing device, albeit huge, but you could see the potential. I loved doing wireless IRC and email on the sofa. > It wasn't very integrated but I > carried two devices for a long time (I only upgraded from that phone > from 2000 (nine years later) once it was obsoleted on the network > because it lacked 911-location features and it was blocked from > re-provisioning by changes in regulation in the US market). Aha. I had a Motorola tri-band TimePort 7089: http://www.mobilecollectors.net/phone/997/Motorola-Timeport%20L7089 This didn't do predictive text, so I linked it to the Psion via IRDA and texted from a Psion app. Then I got a Nokia 6310i: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6310i This did T9 wonderfully quickly, but linked via IRDA to my Psion 5 and later 5MX. I could even make a PPP connection and do email and the web, slowly but just occasionally amazingly useful. I could also sync, sort and internationalise my phonebook, backup my SMSes and so on. For the time, the integration was good. The Timeport is probably around the time I found myself in a London pub with a visiting American friend. My friends and I were using SMS messages to organise when and where to meet. The American commented that sadly American phones didn't do that and didn't support such features. I told them that they did. No, nossir, no way, nope. So I asked for their number and texted them. The phone made a noise they'd never heard before and a tiny envelope appeared above the clock. They were so shocked and taken aback they nearly suffered an embarrasing self-control favour. I had to show them how to open the message. They were utterly aghast. Probably cost us about $1 each to send and to receive -- years later I discovered that what drove things like iMessage and WhatsApp is that American cellphone users paid to _receive_ text messages. This blew the minds of every European who learned it. We paid a tiny amount to send them, under 5¢, and only when the few thousand you got for free every month were exhausted -- but no European network ever charged to _receive_ SMS. Amazing stuff. > Because of my background writing code for the 68000, I entertained > writing apps for PalmOS but I never managed to do more than get the > SDK and fiddle around a bit. I never completed a project from > end-to-end. > > So I liked the Palm Pilot, but I didn't have a Psion to compare it to, > and I can see where you are coming from, from a user experience > standpoint. I guess the killer thing for me was the keyboard. I did learn Graffiti -- on a Newton, at first -- but I found it slow and clunky. Psions were like tiny laptops that went into a jacket pocket. 25-30 hours of continuous use on 2 AA alkalines, a daylight-readable screen, a keyboard you could hi-speed thumb-type on (series 3) or touch-type on (series 5). Usable held in both hands, or if placed on a desk, the superb hinge designs meant that the screen and keyboard were at a usable angle, and touchscreen models didn't tip over. 2 storage slots, wired and wireless comms, sound recording and playback. Nothing ever came close. An HP LX was like using a DOS PC compared to a colour Mac. Annoying music but a demo of a late-model Series 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlv1naXDYHs Demo o
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 6:44 AM Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > ...I was never a big fan > of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the > Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a > way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you > in your pocket. Interesting view of Palm usage that I hadn't considered. > I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. Nor did I. When I carried a Palm Pilot every day, I was using UNIX 'mail' for work e-mail and did all local edits of my calendar on the Palm. I did backup my Palm Pilot, to my Linux Laptop (I still have backups files from 1999 in an archive folder). What I used mine for was a clock, a local calendar, and once I got a keyboard, a portable note-taker in meetings, plus games and other trivial apps. I also got a snap-on GPS and used it when making 1-2 hour flights in a small plane (battery life was an issue on longer flights since it wasn't designed for continuous use, even with the backlight off). And a few times, I used a vt100 app and the standard serial sync cable to log into and update a Cisco switch. Thinking back, once I had that Palm V which could stay powered on in the cradle, I used an HD44780 LCD emulator to do desktop testing of LCDproc, an Open Source project I still work with. Most of this is odd usage compared to the target market. > [Psion] ... fit in my pocket and ran for a month on 2 AA cells. The Palm was definitely more battery hungry. I ended up spending a lot of money on an early NiMh battery pack that had a replacement battery cover that allowed for through-the-cover recharging. Eventually, I got a used Palm V to recharge in the cradle. I also got an app to migrate some apps to internal Flash so I wouldn't have to reload them when my battery did go flat. I _did_ like carrying around a 68000-based portable machine in a day when laptops were thick and heavy and had abysmal battery life. I didn't have a mobile phone for the first several years I had a Palm. Later, when I got a phone, it made phone calls and that was it. Co-workers did experiment with the Palm Treo phone, but that was far too expensive for me to consider. It wasn't very integrated but I carried two devices for a long time (I only upgraded from that phone from 2000 (nine years later) once it was obsoleted on the network because it lacked 911-location features and it was blocked from re-provisioning by changes in regulation in the US market). Because of my background writing code for the 68000, I entertained writing apps for PalmOS but I never managed to do more than get the SDK and fiddle around a bit. I never completed a project from end-to-end. So I liked the Palm Pilot, but I didn't have a Psion to compare it to, and I can see where you are coming from, from a user experience standpoint. -ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 20:06, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > > I don't think that my Fossil (Palm-OS WATCH) does IRDA. > I should find somebody who will pay me money for such a piece of > crap^H^H^H^H NEAT technology. Good question. I was slightly tempted when they were being sold off cheap at the end of production, but I resisted. I was never a big fan of PalmOS, TBH. Too limited for me as a former Psion user, and the Palm devices were always very tied to a PC -- they were meant to be a way to take your Outlook (or whatever) address book and diary with you in your pocket. I didn't use Outlook or a desktop PC PIM at all. I used my Psions for that stuff. It multitasked with anything, had a better richer calendar app than any PC product ever written, was more reliable than any general-purpose desktop PC ever, and fit in my pocket and ran for a month on 2 AA cells. I suspect that one of the things that contributed to Psion's downfall is that AFAIK they never really cracked the US market, which was dominated by weird expensive little gadgets that tried to be a tiny, hopelessly-compromised generic PC in a tiny form-factor -- things like, well: > NOTE: > I consider the OQOs (XP or Linux in a pocket; need to sell off of a bunch > of them), and the Fossil to be "Classic" even if they don't follow a > 10-year/20-year/30-year guideline :-) ... like the OQO, the Poqet, the DIP Portfolio, the HP LX and Omnigo range, etc. In the 1990s and indeed the first decade of the 2000s, it was, on the face of it, clear plain and obvious that you couldn't fit a generic PC clone that you'd actually want to use into your pocket, and if you compromised it so you could, it would be horrid: either it would have a battery life roughly as long as a hummingbird orgasm, or it would be a PC with the capabilities of a desktop from a decade or 2 earlier. So, an early 1980s PC class machine in the 1990s -- HP LX etc. -- or a 1990s laptop in the noughties. The result was, to my European eyes, a succession of overpriced, underspecified, clever but undesirable gadgets. And the response to _that_ was the Palm range, which were just an accessory to a business PC. I didn't want either. The European solution was different. It said: "OK then, we can't fit the hardware to run a desktop OS into a pocket and deliver a good experience, so what we'll do is this: we'll fit the best hardware we can on a budget and with decent power consumption so it doesn't run out inconveniently fast, and we'll write bespoke software to run on it to deliver the functionality customers actually need." The result was first, the Psions. A little later, in the Nordic countries, the Nokia mobile phones. Psion's first try, the MC laptops. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=737&st=1 Neat hardware, clever OS, but decent PC laptops were coming. So they shrank it into the Psion Series 3 range: http://www.retroisle.com/others/psion/series3/general.php I suspect many American readers have never seen or held one of these so it might be worth a read. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/4020/Psion-Series-3/ https://stevelitchfield.com/historyofpsion.htm The Series 3 had a small screen but an elegant multitasking GUI OS on an 8086. Optimised for keyboard operation, no touchscreen. Very rich PIM apps -- seriously, unsurpassed on any other platform. Rock-solid OS. Only connected to PCs for backing up. The range gradually got bigger screens and more RAM over the next few years. Then they realised they'd reached the end of the line fort the hardware, rewrote the OS in C++ for ARM and did the Psion 5 range: https://thenewstack.io/retrocomputing-in-modern-times-rediscovering-the-psion-series-5mx/ An Australian assessment: http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/m5palm.htm When Psion saw that the writing was on the wall for PDAs without wireless comms, they formed Symbian, rewrote the OS to have a comms stack, and moved successfully into smartphones. There were some missteps though. The OS was written in C++ before the language was really ready, and so it went its own, non-standard way. (The same problem arguably afflicted Be and BeOS.) There was no standard GUI for Symbian: they led each licensee do their own, with no source-code compatibility. That was a big mistake. As a result, there were several: * UIQ on Sony Ericsson devices * Nokia Series 60 -- for candybar phones with a numeric keypad * Nokia Series 80 -- a recreated Psion UI for the ill-fated 7700 series. That's what I bought. * Nokia Series 80 -- for the QWERTY-equipped Communicators, somewhat inspired by Geos and the HP OmniGo * MOAP by NTT DoCoMo -- Japanese market only Then later, realising this was a mess, they tried to reconcile them, flailing around with a Qt abstraction later, buying TrollTech to do it, and other efforts, but it was too little too late. Symbian had some unique attributes. E.g. it was the *only* smartphone OS to offer good enough realtime for single-CPU phones, running the
Re: Modems and external dialers.
I think the DN11 had several options available, but don't recall much about them. I have one left if you need a look at it. Paul On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 9:57 PM Phil Budne via cctalk wrote: > See the v6 dn (IV) man page: > > http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/4/dn > > NAME > dn - DN-11 ACU interface > > DESCRIPTION > The dn? files are write-only. The permissible codes are: > > 0-9 dial 0-9 > : dial * > ; dial # > - 4 second delay for second dial tone > = end-of-number > > The entire telephone number must be presented in a single > write system call. > > It is recommended that an end-of-number code be given even > though not all ACU's actually require it. > >
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/5/19 11:38 AM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
Typically a thick flat disk that clipped to the dial, with a motor and a
clutch to permit the dial and disk to return to rest position.
That sounds suspiciously like you've seen something like I was trying to
describe.
But, a FINGER is such a better visual image!
;-)
Prior to Carterfone V Western Electric, (1968) . . .
There were DAAs RENTED by TPC ("The Phone Company" (cf, "The President's
Analyst")), dialers RENTED by TPC, and acoustic couplers in the
after-market.
There were devices that sat on top of the "hook" of the phone (where the
handset rested to hang up, with the handset on top of them. A solenoid
could lift the handset for "off-hook", and set it down again for hang-up.
In some cases, such as answering machines, that sandwich in between the
phone and handset had speaker and microphone, but I don't recall ever
seeing a modem made that way - "common sense" held that you needed
"cups" for the handset for noise isolation.
I've seen something conceptually similar within the last 10 years to
take a handset off hook in support of a wireless headset.
Carterfone was extremely significant as it allowed connecting to the
phone line "if it did not damage or interfere with normal operations".
ACK
Carter started trying to peddle his systems in 1959, but AT&T So,
Carterfone is to thank for all direct connect telephone devices, indeed,
all "foreign attachments", even a plastic cup that clipped on the phone
handset for a little more privacy!
AT&T rejected ANYTHING that connected, on the grounds that even that
plastic privacy cup degraded the quality of the sound.
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/1/1.2CarterfoneATT_FCC48-67.html
I can't say as I'm surprised.
Prior to Carterfone, you had acoustic couplers, switch-hook solenoids,
DAAs RENTED by TPC, and only TPC dialers. Once direct connection was
available, you got things like the PhoneMate dialer, and moving piece of
mylar with marks and photocells.
Later, "Touch tone" made it possible to "dial" by making noises into the
phone, both simple dialers (cf. Hayes "ATDT") and simple devices to
implement the full set of DTMF tones (cf. blue boxes, and DTMF C-tone to
turn off FBI phone recording taps)
"Hayes Compatible" was a marketing term to describe anything that used
the same (orsimilar) commands as Hayes. But, Hayes, themselves, never
fully created a standard. Joe Campbell ("C Programmers Guide To Serial
Communications", "The RS232 Solution", etc.) once consulted for Hayes to
try to help them make such a standard out of the myriad devices they
already had extant.
ACK
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/5/19 3:08 PM, John Labovitz via cctalk wrote: being a BBS aficionado I’d heard of a technique called ‘callback’ that some BBSes implemented, which allowed for using a POTS line for both dial-up modem and for voice. The idea was that if you wanted to dial into a BBS with callback, you’d dial up, let it ring once, hang up, then call back; the modem on the BBS system would only answer on the *second* call. That's a decidedly different meaning for callback than I'm used to hearing. I'm used to it being applied in a security context. As in you would call into a system, identify yourself, hang up, and then it would call back the number stored on file for the account. So calls going in opposing directions. I guess this could have also been used to alter which end paid for calls. The first call would be short and relatively inexpensive. The second call (back) would be longer and could be expensive and take advantage of better long distance rates as applicable. The software (in my case, the BYE modem/IO handler that run on my CP/M system) would watch the ring-detect line on the serial port, and once it went high, it would set a timer for a little more than six seconds (2 for the ring, 4 for the silence). If the timer expired, it would set a flag to answer on the *next* ring — which would have been the second call. If a ring came in before the timer fired, it would ignore the call — assuming it was *not* a computer calling in, but rather a voice call. And if no call came in within a few seconds more, the state would reset for a new call. It worked pretty well, as long as the BBS callers knew how to use callback. After a few months of those shenanigans my parents allowed me to order a second dedicated line, so they wouldn’t be woken up in the middle of the night. Intriguing technique. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/5/19 12:01 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
"MODEM" is short for "MODulator-DEModulator"
It is explicitly a device that took data and "MODULATED" it into audio
tones for the phone, and took tones from the phone and "DEMODULATED"
them into data.
Yes. That's generally what a modem is. Data on one side and something
else on the other side. The other side could be audio like the handset
of a phone, or it could be a phone line, or it could be coax for a cable
modem.
Most of the modems that I've seen were data on one side and phone lines
on the other side. Conversely the modem that Ethan was talking about
had data on one side and the audio portion on the other side. The phone
was required as an integral piece to convert the audio from the modem to
the phone line required by the PSTN. The modem would not work without
the phone. Where as most modems, the pone isn't involved and / or can
be completely absent.
Bell 103 used one frequency for 1 and another for 0, and a different
pair for the other side, to at least in theory permit full-duplex.
1270Hz/1070Hz and 2225Hz/2025Hz
A couple of my students tried to make an almost entirely software based
modem that just counted the waves.
If you calculate how many waves of the tone you get at 300 per second,
you can see why the speed could not be increased [MUCH].
"it is impossible to go faster than that"
Later systems to try to speed things up went to PHASE-shift keying, "it
is impossible to go faster than that"
quadrature, etc.
"it is impossible to go faster than that"
even compression ("56K" V.90,etc.)
each of which had its own theoretical speed limits, and "it is
impossible to go faster than that"
Intriguing.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
This talk of auto-dialers reminded me of a couple of things from modem culture… I ran a BBS when I was a teenager in Maryland in the early 80s. We only had one phone line (like most everyone else), but being a BBS aficionado I’d heard of a technique called ‘callback’ that some BBSes implemented, which allowed for using a POTS line for both dial-up modem and for voice. The idea was that if you wanted to dial into a BBS with callback, you’d dial up, let it ring once, hang up, then call back; the modem on the BBS system would only answer on the *second* call. The software (in my case, the BYE modem/IO handler that run on my CP/M system) would watch the ring-detect line on the serial port, and once it went high, it would set a timer for a little more than six seconds (2 for the ring, 4 for the silence). If the timer expired, it would set a flag to answer on the *next* ring — which would have been the second call. If a ring came in before the timer fired, it would ignore the call — assuming it was *not* a computer calling in, but rather a voice call. And if no call came in within a few seconds more, the state would reset for a new call. It worked pretty well, as long as the BBS callers knew how to use callback. After a few months of those shenanigans my parents allowed me to order a second dedicated line, so they wouldn’t be woken up in the middle of the night. The other thing I remember was discovering variable baud rates. The UART in my Heathkit H89 could be set to *any* rate between 1 and 9600 (?) baud. (Setting it to 1 baud was very educational!) Similarly, my Hayes Smartmodem would auto-detect both local and remote speed. It turned out that even though the modem was rated for 300 baud, it could actually be pushed to 450 or sometimes 600 — and some other modems (like the PMMI 103, a popular S-100 modem) would do the same. So I advertised both 300 & 450 baud for my BBS. 450 felt so fast! :) —John
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 06/05/2019 12:01 PM, Electronics Plus via cctalk wrote: > > > -Original Message- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Grant Taylor > via cctalk > Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2019 10:42 AM > To: cctalk@classiccmp.org > Subject: Re: Modems and external dialers. > > On 6/4/19 8:30 PM, allison via cctalk wrote: >> Keep in mins the hardware for auto dial required some for of micro and >> that was a post 1974 thing for the most part. > > Why did it require a micro? Could the host not perform the function > that the micro would do? > >> A few before that had a lot of TTL state machine to do that. >> They obviously weren't cheap. Simple answer was at that time micros were not yet invented. Actually they were but not economical when a 8080 board or 6502 board required a large handful of parts. Before that? Whats an 8080? > Why did that state machine need to be implemented in electronics? It was a way to have rudimentary smarts that was not quite a cpu. > Why couldn't that state machine be implemented in software on the host > using the modem & auto-dialer? > IT was the auto dialer! OR it used manual dialer. >> The dialer was often not at all as it was the human that dialed the phone. > > ~chuckle~ > >> I know of none that did both functions that required a second serial port. > > Okay. > > Reading the links that Ethan provided, it sounds like some auto-dialers > did use a second port, but it was not a second (recommended) standard > 232 port. Instead it was an RS-232 and RS-366. > > Aside: RS-366 sounds odd. A combination of serial signaling and > parallel signaling on the same port. But not the same as a traditional > parallel printer port. > Those likely existed but it was for system that did a lot of dialing out. >> My first modem was a box about 12x8x2.5 inches and it was an all analog >> modem good for 110/300 baud and it required connection to the phone line >> (pre-modular connector) and you dialed the various (and relatively scarce) >> BBSs and when you heard the tone hit the switch that put the modem on >> the phone line and you would see the carrier and data lamps do their >> thing. That was 1978ish. > > Aside: I assume that you're talking about before the small 6-position 2 > or 4 conductor plugs. Or are you referring to the older than that > not-quite-square 4 pin plug? Or was the modem actually hard wired in > with no plug / jack at all? For a lot of years the older hardware TELCO had ws still in place. I still have a 500 series deskset and it works well! So at that time I connected using whatever ways needed, sometimes I upgraded to makes it easier next time. Modular is the RJ stuff newer and still in use, the older was the larger clunky 4 pin plug. My house still has a few. >> A modem that could dial was maybe 1983-5 or so at affordable prices >> (under 300$) for 300 baud. > > *nod* > > I have this mental picture, which I think is based on something I've > seen at some point in the past, that was a device that attached / > actuated / ??? a traditional rotary dial phone. As in it had a finger > that interfaced with the dial and something that could rotate it to dial > the digit in question, rewind (term?), and dial the next digit in question. > Wild idea but never saw that one. I have the advantage of spanning computing from late 60s to now. The intersting case was 1970, PDP10 with PDP8I the 8I did all the communications between the 10 (blkio) and the modem bank which was dial in only. Over 300 users on the BOCES LIRICS computer network and 98% of them were ASR33 with 110baud acoustic coupled modem. the last 2% were ASR35 and Hazeltine 1000 and 2000 terminals in the center (local 1200baud!). So I remember pre-carterphone to 56K modems, then DSL and now fiber. My memory of carterphone was a interconnect for radios (Amateur radio) and how we then just did it being very careful with transformer isolation. By 1970 I was working in the land mobile industry with remote base radios connected with RTL (Radio Tie Lines) which were just a pair of rented wires (owned by TPC aka telco) between the business to the hill where the radios were. They had to pass DC and every so often some bright eyes would add load coils and effectively short out the line. That would cause a day of troubleshooting as it was never the TPCs fault. At least according to them. Allison
Re: Modems and external dialers.
Prior to Carterfone V Western Electric, (1968) . . .
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:
The 1968 Carterfone decision did eventually result in customers being
allowed to hook their own devices up directly to the phone line, but
contrary to what a lot of online sources including Wikipedia claim, that
didn't really happen until the FCC promulgated the Part 68 regulations in
1975. The immediate reaction to Carterfone was that in 1968 Bell created a
"foreign attachment" tariff, which allowed customers to lease the type CBS
or CBT Data Access Arrangements (DAA), which included protective coupling
circuitry, and connect their own devices to the network only indirectly
through the DAA.
I remember well, seeing mention of Carterfone in a magazine (at a
newstand), at or shortly after the time.
I thought, "WOW! lots of aftermarket phones, better answering machines,
modems, not being asked to PAY for an extension, and neat stuff! But, I
wonder how many years it will be before that moves from theoretical
possibilities to actually being able to connect? How will TPC ("The
Presiden't Analyst") manage to make money off of it? Will they add
special noises to phone lines to disrupt modems, or will they peddle
s'posedly better lines for data use?"
There is very little detail on this available online, but I found that
Google Books can show relevant excerpts from _Communciations Law and
Practice_ by Stuart N. Brotman, 2006 printing (originally published 1995).
See pages 5-19 and 5-20.
THANK YOU!!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 11:38 AM Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
> Prior to Carterfone V Western Electric, (1968) . . .
> There were DAAs RENTED by TPC ("The Phone Company" (cf, "The President's
> Analyst")), dialers RENTED by TPC, and acoustic couplers in the
> after-market.
[...]
> Prior to Carterfone, you had acoustic couplers, switch-hook solenoids,
> DAAs RENTED by TPC, and only TPC dialers. Once direct connection was
> available, you got things like the PhoneMate dialer, and moving piece of
> mylar with marks and photocells.
>
The 1968 Carterfone decision did eventually result in customers being
allowed to hook their own devices up directly to the phone line, but
contrary to what a lot of online sources including Wikipedia claim, that
didn't really happen until the FCC promulgated the Part 68 regulations in
1975. The immediate reaction to Carterfone was that in 1968 Bell created a
"foreign attachment" tariff, which allowed customers to lease the type CBS
or CBT Data Access Arrangements (DAA), which included protective coupling
circuitry, and connect their own devices to the network only indirectly
through the DAA.
Starting in 1975, equipment could be sold for direct attachment if it met
the Part 68 requirements and was registered with the FCC. The equipment had
to bear a label with the Ringer Equivalency Number (REN), and the
subscriber was supposed to notify the phone company of the RENs of the
devices they were using. I don't know anyone who actually did so.
There is very little detail on this available online, but I found that
Google Books can show relevant excerpts from _Communciations Law and
Practice_ by Stuart N. Brotman, 2006 printing (originally published 1995).
See pages 5-19 and 5-20.
Re: Modems and external dialers.
> But, a FINGER is such a better visual image! > There were devices that sat on top of the "hook" of the phone (where the > > handset rested to hang up, with the handset on top of them. A solenoid > > could lift the handset for "off-hook", and set it down again for hang-up. Did anyone ever make a "dialer" that operated by pressing/releasing the switch hook? Seems a solenoid to do that would be a lot simpler than a "motorized finger." Just curious. Will "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The names of global variables should start with // " -- https://isocpp.org
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series 5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them. I don't think that my Fossil (Palm-OS WATCH) does IRDA. I should find somebody who will pay me money for such a piece of crap^H^H^H^H NEAT technology. NOTE: I consider the OQOs (XP or Linux in a pocket; need to sell off of a bunch of them), and the Fossil to be "Classic" even if they don't follow a 10-year/20-year/30-year guideline :-)
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
So the phone played an active role in modem communications. At least in so
far as it converted the purely audio from the modem to telephony used by the
PSTN.
"MODEM" is short for "MODulator-DEModulator"
It is explicitly a device that took data and "MODULATED" it into audio
tones for the phone, and took tones from the phone and "DEMODULATED" them
into data.
Bell 103 used one frequency for 1 and another for 0, and a different pair
for the other side, to at least in theory permit full-duplex.
1270Hz/1070Hz and 2225Hz/2025Hz
A couple of my students tried to make an almost entirely software based
modem that just counted the waves.
If you calculate how many waves of the tone you get at 300 per second, you
can see why the speed could not be increased [MUCH].
"it is impossible to go faster than that"
Later systems to try to speed things up went to PHASE-shift keying,
"it is impossible to go faster than that"
quadrature, etc.
"it is impossible to go faster than that"
even compression ("56K" V.90,etc.)
each of which had its own theoretical speed limits, and
"it is impossible to go faster than that"
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 11:45 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > On 6/5/19 9:58 AM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote: > > Not quite... the USD 801 ACU I keep mentioning supported dialing using > > either RS-232 or RS-366 over the same physical port. It was a flexible > > device that would work with a parallel dialing controller like the DEC > > DN11 or by just using a second serial port from your host. > > Okay. Now I'm even more confused. I'll have to go back and re-read > some of the links you shared. I'd swear that the brochure mentioned 1 x > RS-232 + 1 x RS-366 -or- 2 x RS-232 port requirement on hosts. I agree with what that brochure says. The 801 ACU + Modem needed either RS-366 + 1 x RS-232 or 2 x RS-232 depending on what you had to drive it. It was more flexible than some other ACUs that only provided one type of physical connection. The DN11 connects to the 801 ACU via RS-366. In conjunction with that, one of your PDP-11/VAX RS-232 serial ports was used for the modem. For the COMBOARD example, the COMBOARD itself provided a sync serial port, not a serial port of the VAX you were on, to talk to the sync modem, _but_ one of the VAX ports _was_ used to drive the 801 ACU. > > The other connector was a handset connector for a standard US telephone > > (narrow 4p4c jack). The rest of my message was about the VICmodem and nothing to do with an 801 ACU. > So the phone played an active role in modem communications. At least in > so far as it converted the purely audio from the modem to telephony used > by the PSTN. Yes. > Intriguing. I've never done much with anything other than 9600 or > 115200 for terminal connections to equipment to configure & manage said > equipment. My first 9600 connection to a machine was a local terminal on a VAX at work. My own gear didn't go that fast in those days. I'm trying to remember if I got a (new) Amiga 1000 first or a (used) PDP-11/23 first, but one of those two was what I could finally use to go that fast at home. My fastest modem for a long while was a borrowed 1200 baud modem for calling into work/school. My first modems were the aforementioned VICmodem (300 baud) and a suitcase-sized 110 baud "DataSet" mounted into the bottom of an ASR33. -ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
I have this mental picture, which I think is based on something I've
seen at some point in the past, that was a device that attached /
actuated / ??? a traditional rotary dial phone. As in it had a finger
that interfaced with the dial and something that could rotate it to
dial the digit in question, rewind (term?), and dial the next digit in
question.
Typically a thick flat disk that clipped to the dial, with a motor and a
clutch to permit the dial and disk to return to rest position.
But, a FINGER is such a better visual image!
Prior to Carterfone V Western Electric, (1968) . . .
There were DAAs RENTED by TPC ("The Phone Company" (cf, "The President's
Analyst")), dialers RENTED by TPC, and acoustic couplers in the
after-market.
There were devices that sat on top of the "hook" of the phone (where the
handset rested to hang up, with the handset on top of them. A solenoid
could lift the handset for "off-hook", and set it down again for hang-up.
In some cases, such as answering machines, that sandwich in between the
phone and handset had speaker and microphone, but I don't recall ever
seeing a modem made that way - "common sense" held that you needed "cups"
for the handset for noise isolation.
Carterfone was extremely significant as it allowed connecting to the phone
line "if it did not damage or interfere with normal operations".
Carter started trying to peddle his systems in 1959, but AT&T
So, Carterfone is to thank for all direct connect telephone devices,
indeed, all "foreign attachments", even a plastic cup that clipped on the
phone handset for a little more privacy!
AT&T rejected ANYTHING that connected, on the grounds that even that
plastic privacy cup degraded the quality of the sound.
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/1/1.2CarterfoneATT_FCC48-67.html
Prior to Carterfone, you had acoustic couplers, switch-hook solenoids,
DAAs RENTED by TPC, and only TPC dialers. Once direct connection was
available, you got things like the PhoneMate dialer, and moving piece of
mylar with marks and photocells.
Later, "Touch tone" made it possible to "dial" by making noises into the
phone, both simple dialers (cf. Hayes "ATDT") and simple devices to
implement the full set of DTMF tones (cf. blue boxes, and DTMF C-tone to
turn off FBI phone recording taps)
"Hayes Compatible" was a marketing term to describe anything that used the
same (orsimilar) commands as Hayes. But, Hayes, themselves, never fully
created a standard. Joe Campbell ("C Programmers Guide To Serial
Communications", "The RS232 Solution", etc.) once consulted for Hayes to
try to help them make such a standard out of the myriad devices they
already had extant.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 11:27 AM John Labovitz via cctalk wrote: > I do recall a little handheld device with a touchtone keyboard that you could > fit > over the microphone of a normal handset. It wasn’t automated, but at least you > didn’t have to use the rotary dial. (This presumed, of course, that the telco > switch > was DTMF-compatible.) I still have one of those. I had it in my hand last month wondering if I'd ever use it again. Maybe for a VCF display. -ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 8:30 PM allison via cctalk wrote: > Keep in mins the hardware for auto dial required some for of micro and > that was a post 1974 thing for the most part. A few before that had a > lot of TTL state machine to do that. They obviously weren't cheap. > AFAIK the first commercially dialer for data use was the Bell 801A Automatic Calling Unit from 1964. It didn't contain a state machine any more complicated than a four-bit counter to send the appropriate number of dial pulses, though in 1964 even that was a fair bit of circuitry. As with other Western Electric equipment, it wasn't cheaply made, and also was not inexpensive to rent. The only thing preventing other companies from making less expensive alternatives was that customers were still not allowed to connect their own equipment directly to the PSTN at that time. The host computer presented one digit at a time to it over a four-bit parallel interface (using either EIA RS-232 levels or relay contact closures, depending on model). The 801C from 1965 used DTMF rather than pulse, and somewhat ironically its innards are actually _simpler_ than the 801A, because it doesn't need the four-bit counter. I suspect that it generated the DTMF using almost the same circuit as the original DTMF encoders in telephones, with a single transistor and multiple inductors. However, unlike the telephone, it needed circuitry to decode the four bit BCD input from the customer equipment to the two-of-four selections for the DTMF encoder.
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/5/19 10:27 AM, John Labovitz via cctalk wrote: Character-based I/O on mainframes and even minicomputers was fairly rare at that point. On some systems it was impossible; on others it was very CPU-intensive. I remember trying to do character I/O on a Tandem NonStop; it wasn’t easy, or effective. Having a dedicated microcomputer solved a lot of problems. Ah. Now the need for another computer makes sense. My dad actually built a successful company in the 1980s to do just that: he build front-end controllers, which were essentially large number of serial ports connected to a rack of Z80 boards, which would then be connected to a mini (a Tandem) or mainframe via some bulk-oriented format. For example, I wrote code for him that let a typical terminal (eg, Wyse, VT-100) emulate a Univac block-style terminal. All the input, screen management, etc. was done on the Z80 machines, then shipped over in a multiplex fashion first to the Tandem and then to a Univac as block forms. ACK You’re getting warmer. ;-) Modems started out as straight modulators-demodulators, connecting two remote devices (computers, terminals, printers) over a point-to-point leased line specially installed from the local telephone company — basically like a T1 line would be installed today. The POTS line was hard-wired (via screw-down terminals) on one side of the modem and the digital data connector (eg, DB-25) on the other. Usually the connections were always on; I suppose the billing was probably by data usage, or even fixed price, instead of by time. ACK We used some 56 kbps (bit robbed) lines for terminal multiplexers at my job around 2000. They were always on and (I think) just billed at a monthly rate for the line. Maybe someone created that monstrosity (;-), but the typical usage was that you used an acoustic coupler modem that had cups where a typical handset would fit. The modem itself only had a data connection to the terminal (or printer or card reader/punch). Next to the modem was a regular telephone — you dialed the number on the phone, and once you heard the carrier squeal, you’d quickly set the handset into the coupler. Usually you’d see a spurt of random characters on the screen which was the modem getting confused by the carrier being gradually synced up. To hang up, you’d simply pull the handset out of the coupler and hang it up as normal. ACK I do recall a little handheld device with a touchtone keyboard that you could fit over the microphone of a normal handset. It wasn’t automated, but at least you didn’t have to use the rotary dial. (This presumed, of course, that the telco switch was DTMF-compatible.) I remember things like that. I also remember a pager for kids that didn't even have a display. It simply dialed the number by playing the DTMF tones into a mouth piece. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:40, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote: > > Why? Handheld touchtone generators were very common in the > the early 90's. Even the late 80's. I bought mine in Radio > Shack. They were often needed if your employer used an in > house private phone network (like MMDS where I worked) or > a phone accessed Email system (like IBM's PROFS) because > the phone company had this habit of turning off the keypad > on payphones after the first connection. This may be a European thing, I don't know. This wasn't a phone-dialling device or anything. It was a tiny pocket computer, but unlike something like an HP 95LX, it was a GUI machine with a diary, address book, word-processor, spreadsheet and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3 It wasn't the first "digital diary" of course, but it was the best. Ultimately a later, ARM version of the OS became the basis of Symbian. But the fact that your pocket address book could dial the phone for you -- not by being a keypad or anything, just by picking it up, looking for Bob and pressing DIAL and then holding it near the phone -- was impressive for its time. One of my favourite things to do with its successor model (the Series 5) was pull up an address entry, and when someone pulled out a Palm Pilot and starting trying to scribble Graffiti into it, to stop them and transmit the contact to them by IRDA. Most Palm owners had no idea that their devices spoke infra-red and for them to get a whole contact instantly by wireless was deeply impressive to them. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/5/19 9:58 AM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote: Not quite... the USD 801 ACU I keep mentioning supported dialing using either RS-232 or RS-366 over the same physical port. It was a flexible device that would work with a parallel dialing controller like the DEC DN11 or by just using a second serial port from your host. Okay. Now I'm even more confused. I'll have to go back and re-read some of the links you shared. I'd swear that the brochure mentioned 1 x RS-232 + 1 x RS-366 -or- 2 x RS-232 port requirement on hosts. The other connector was a handset connector for a standard US telephone (narrow 4p4c jack). To use this modem, you'd load and run your terminal app then pick up the phone and dial the number. When the far end answered, you'd unplug the coiled cord from the handset and quickly plug it into the VICmodem before the other end hung up. So the phone played an active role in modem communications. At least in so far as it converted the purely audio from the modem to telephony used by the PSTN. It did have the advantage over an acoustic coupler in that room noise was not a factor ACK Analogues to the Line-Out to Line-In for audio recording vs speaker and microphone. (Quite literally.) it had the advantage over a Hayes modem of cost (ISTR the VICmodem was somewhere around $70 and did not require the $50 Commodore RS-232 "interface" (analog level shifter with DB25 port). I did eventually get that RS-232 cartridge but not for modem work. I got it to hook my C-64 to other local machines for file transfer. ACK Like a lot of hobbyists in the 70s and 80s, I spent a lot of time making serial adapters and debugging serial comms. It came in handy when I went to work for the place that made sync serial devices. I still do most of my hacking on a Dell laptop that's old enough to have a real serial port and I do use that port. It has advantages over USB dongles for some of the less-traditional uses (like 45.45 / 50 bps and 2 stop bits for old teletypes). Intriguing. I've never done much with anything other than 9600 or 115200 for terminal connections to equipment to configure & manage said equipment. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/5/19 12:30 PM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote: > On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:27, John Labovitz via cctalk > wrote: > >> >> I do recall a little handheld device with a touchtone keyboard that you >> could fit over the microphone of a normal handset. It wasn’t automated, but >> at least you didn’t have to use the rotary dial. > > This was a built-in feature of the Psion range of PDAs. The address > book app could dial any number in the address book, merely by holding > it up to the phone mouthpiece. > > It blew people's minds at the time (very early 1990s). > Why? Handheld touchtone generators were very common in the the early 90's. Even the late 80's. I bought mine in Radio Shack. They were often needed if your employer used an in house private phone network (like MMDS where I worked) or a phone accessed Email system (like IBM's PROFS) because the phone company had this habit of turning off the keypad on payphones after the first connection. bill
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2019 at 18:27, John Labovitz via cctalk wrote: > > I do recall a little handheld device with a touchtone keyboard that you could > fit over the microphone of a normal handset. It wasn’t automated, but at > least you didn’t have to use the rotary dial. This was a built-in feature of the Psion range of PDAs. The address book app could dial any number in the address book, merely by holding it up to the phone mouthpiece. It blew people's minds at the time (very early 1990s). -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Jun 5, 2019, at 11:42 AM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > Why did it require a micro? Could the host not perform the function that the > micro would do? […] Why couldn't that state machine be implemented in > software on the host using the modem & auto-dialer? Character-based I/O on mainframes and even minicomputers was fairly rare at that point. On some systems it was impossible; on others it was very CPU-intensive. I remember trying to do character I/O on a Tandem NonStop; it wasn’t easy, or effective. Having a dedicated microcomputer solved a lot of problems. My dad actually built a successful company in the 1980s to do just that: he build front-end controllers, which were essentially large number of serial ports connected to a rack of Z80 boards, which would then be connected to a mini (a Tandem) or mainframe via some bulk-oriented format. For example, I wrote code for him that let a typical terminal (eg, Wyse, VT-100) emulate a Univac block-style terminal. All the input, screen management, etc. was done on the Z80 machines, then shipped over in a multiplex fashion first to the Tandem and then to a Univac as block forms. > Reading the links that Ethan provided, it sounds like some auto-dialers did > use a second port, but it was not a second (recommended) standard 232 port. > Instead it was an RS-232 and RS-366. […] Or was the modem actually hard wired > in with no plug / jack at all? You’re getting warmer. ;-) Modems started out as straight modulators-demodulators, connecting two remote devices (computers, terminals, printers) over a point-to-point leased line specially installed from the local telephone company — basically like a T1 line would be installed today. The POTS line was hard-wired (via screw-down terminals) on one side of the modem and the digital data connector (eg, DB-25) on the other. Usually the connections were always on; I suppose the billing was probably by data usage, or even fixed price, instead of by time. > I have this mental picture, which I think is based on something I've seen at > some point in the past, that was a device that attached / actuated / ??? a > traditional rotary dial phone. As in it had a finger that interfaced with > the dial and something that could rotate it to dial the digit in question, > rewind (term?), and dial the next digit in question. Maybe someone created that monstrosity (;-), but the typical usage was that you used an acoustic coupler modem that had cups where a typical handset would fit. The modem itself only had a data connection to the terminal (or printer or card reader/punch). Next to the modem was a regular telephone — you dialed the number on the phone, and once you heard the carrier squeal, you’d quickly set the handset into the coupler. Usually you’d see a spurt of random characters on the screen which was the modem getting confused by the carrier being gradually synced up. To hang up, you’d simply pull the handset out of the coupler and hang it up as normal. I do recall a little handheld device with a touchtone keyboard that you could fit over the microphone of a normal handset. It wasn’t automated, but at least you didn’t have to use the rotary dial. (This presumed, of course, that the telco switch was DTMF-compatible.) —John
RE: Modems and external dialers.
-Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Grant Taylor via cctalk Sent: Wednesday, June 05, 2019 10:42 AM To: cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Modems and external dialers. On 6/4/19 8:30 PM, allison via cctalk wrote: > Keep in mins the hardware for auto dial required some for of micro and > that was a post 1974 thing for the most part. Why did it require a micro? Could the host not perform the function that the micro would do? > A few before that had a lot of TTL state machine to do that. > They obviously weren't cheap. Why did that state machine need to be implemented in electronics? Why couldn't that state machine be implemented in software on the host using the modem & auto-dialer? > The dialer was often not at all as it was the human that dialed the phone. ~chuckle~ > I know of none that did both functions that required a second serial port. Okay. Reading the links that Ethan provided, it sounds like some auto-dialers did use a second port, but it was not a second (recommended) standard 232 port. Instead it was an RS-232 and RS-366. Aside: RS-366 sounds odd. A combination of serial signaling and parallel signaling on the same port. But not the same as a traditional parallel printer port. > My first modem was a box about 12x8x2.5 inches and it was an all analog > modem good for 110/300 baud and it required connection to the phone line > (pre-modular connector) and you dialed the various (and relatively scarce) > BBSs and when you heard the tone hit the switch that put the modem on > the phone line and you would see the carrier and data lamps do their > thing. That was 1978ish. Aside: I assume that you're talking about before the small 6-position 2 or 4 conductor plugs. Or are you referring to the older than that not-quite-square 4 pin plug? Or was the modem actually hard wired in with no plug / jack at all? > A modem that could dial was maybe 1983-5 or so at affordable prices > (under 300$) for 300 baud. *nod* I have this mental picture, which I think is based on something I've seen at some point in the past, that was a device that attached / actuated / ??? a traditional rotary dial phone. As in it had a finger that interfaced with the dial and something that could rotate it to dial the digit in question, rewind (term?), and dial the next digit in question. -- Grant. . . . unix || die I used to have Rixon 212A autodialers. There were about the size of a Hayes modem, and only had 1 RS232 port and a phone jack on the back. I no longer have the modems, but I do still have one owner's manual in a binder. IIRC, the dialing was done through a software interface. The other dialers mentioned before were probably twice the size of the Rixon. I do still have one 300 baud acoustical modem in stock, if anyone is interested. AC adapter is included. Cindy --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 10:42 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > Reading the links that Ethan provided, it sounds like some auto-dialers > did use a second port, but it was not a second (recommended) standard > 232 port. Instead it was an RS-232 and RS-366. > > Aside: RS-366 sounds odd. A combination of serial signaling and > parallel signaling on the same port. But not the same as a traditional > parallel printer port. Not quite... the USD 801 ACU I keep mentioning supported dialing using either RS-232 or RS-366 over the same physical port. It was a flexible device that would work with a parallel dialing controller like the DEC DN11 or by just using a second serial port from your host. > > My first modem was a box about 12x8x2.5 inches and it was an all analog > > modem good for 110/300 baud and it required connection to the phone line... My own first modem (vs the sync stuff I've been mentioning) was a Commodore VICmodem that didn't even connect directly to your phone line that I got in late 1982. The host connector was a TTL-level edge connector for the VIC-20/C-64 User Port. There were routines in ROM that emulated a 6850 ACIA for Kernel device #2 (OPEN 2,2,2...) but from an application software standpoint it worked just as if you had a UART in the machine. The other connector was a handset connector for a standard US telephone (narrow 4p4c jack). Internally, the modem was functionally like a Novation Cat without the acoustic cups or the EIA level converters or indicator LEDs. To use this modem, you'd load and run your terminal app then pick up the phone and dial the number. When the far end answered, you'd unplug the coiled cord from the handset and quickly plug it into the VICmodem before the other end hung up. It did have the advantage over an acoustic coupler in that room noise was not a factor and it had the advantage over a Hayes modem of cost (ISTR the VICmodem was somewhere around $70 and did not require the $50 Commodore RS-232 "interface" (analog level shifter with DB25 port). I did eventually get that RS-232 cartridge but not for modem work. I got it to hook my C-64 to other local machines for file transfer. Like a lot of hobbyists in the 70s and 80s, I spent a lot of time making serial adapters and debugging serial comms. It came in handy when I went to work for the place that made sync serial devices. I still do most of my hacking on a Dell laptop that's old enough to have a real serial port and I do use that port. It has advantages over USB dongles for some of the less-traditional uses (like 45.45 / 50 bps and 2 stop bits for old teletypes). -ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/4/19 8:30 PM, allison via cctalk wrote: Keep in mins the hardware for auto dial required some for of micro and that was a post 1974 thing for the most part. Why did it require a micro? Could the host not perform the function that the micro would do? A few before that had a lot of TTL state machine to do that. They obviously weren't cheap. Why did that state machine need to be implemented in electronics? Why couldn't that state machine be implemented in software on the host using the modem & auto-dialer? The dialer was often not at all as it was the human that dialed the phone. ~chuckle~ I know of none that did both functions that required a second serial port. Okay. Reading the links that Ethan provided, it sounds like some auto-dialers did use a second port, but it was not a second (recommended) standard 232 port. Instead it was an RS-232 and RS-366. Aside: RS-366 sounds odd. A combination of serial signaling and parallel signaling on the same port. But not the same as a traditional parallel printer port. My first modem was a box about 12x8x2.5 inches and it was an all analog modem good for 110/300 baud and it required connection to the phone line (pre-modular connector) and you dialed the various (and relatively scarce) BBSs and when you heard the tone hit the switch that put the modem on the phone line and you would see the carrier and data lamps do their thing. That was 1978ish. Aside: I assume that you're talking about before the small 6-position 2 or 4 conductor plugs. Or are you referring to the older than that not-quite-square 4 pin plug? Or was the modem actually hard wired in with no plug / jack at all? A modem that could dial was maybe 1983-5 or so at affordable prices (under 300$) for 300 baud. *nod* I have this mental picture, which I think is based on something I've seen at some point in the past, that was a device that attached / actuated / ??? a traditional rotary dial phone. As in it had a finger that interfaced with the dial and something that could rotate it to dial the digit in question, rewind (term?), and dial the next digit in question. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:50 PM Tony Duell via cctalk
wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 2:45 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk
> wrote:
> >
> > Does anyone have any experience working with modems that didn't include
> > internal / auto dialers?
>
> It wasn't normally a serial port. It was on a DB25 connector, and used
> the same voltages as RS232...
The UDS 801 ACU supported either serial or parallel over the same DB25
connector.
> ...but the number to dial was sent a digit
> at a time over 4 lines (obvious BCD code, I am not sure if the other
> 6 possibilities were used), along with a digit strobe line, various status
> lines, etc.
Yes. I think some of the other 6 codes were used for other dial
symbols (',' for pause, for example) but I didn't quickly find a
definitive list.
> The standard was, I think, RS366, but I have never managed to find
> any real information on it.
Yes. RS366 was the standard for parallel-driven autodiallers, later
EIA-366. Also, V.25 is an autodialler standard.
There's some implementation detail in the DEC DN11 docs on Bitsavers.
-ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 2:45 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > > Does anyone have any experience working with modems that didn't include > internal / auto dialers? Only from the side of the things that talked to them, like the HP11284 interface for the HP9830 > > They came up in a conversation in a newsgroup and I realized that I know > of them, but know virtually nothing about them. > > I think they were separate devices, which probably means that they > likely had separate serial ports to talk to each of them. Did they > support some sort of pass through? Or did they really require two > serial ports on the host? It wasn't normally a serial port. It was on a DB25 connector, and used the same voltages as RS232, but the number to dial was sent a digit at a time over 4 lines (obvious BCD code, I am not sure if the other 6 possibilities were used), along with a digit strobe line, various status lines, etc. The standard was, I think, RS366, but I have never managed to find any real information on it. -tony
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 10:57 PM Phil Budne via cctalk wrote: > See the v6 dn (IV) man page: > > http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/4/dn > > NAME > dn - DN-11 ACU interface The DN11 is a Unibus interface that drives an 801 ACU with a parallel connection. I hadn't remembered it until you mentioned it (we never had one at Software Results). DN11 docs are on Bitsavers. Good catch. -ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
See the v6 dn (IV) man page: http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/4/dn NAME dn - DN-11 ACU interface DESCRIPTION The dn? files are write-only. The permissible codes are: 0-9 dial 0-9 : dial * ; dial # - 4 second delay for second dial tone = end-of-number The entire telephone number must be presented in a single write system call. It is recommended that an end-of-number code be given even though not all ACU's actually require it.
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 9:45 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > Does anyone have any experience working with modems that didn't include > internal / auto dialers? Yes. I used to make and sell sync serial protocol engines (COMBOARDs) that often were used to dial up an IBM Mainframe. Sync modems of the 80s often did not have built-in auto-diallers. Here's one we used to use, a Motorola UDS 801 ACU (Automatic Call Unit). http://nwrusa.com/Networking?product_id=17371 https://www.arcelect.com/801_autodialer.PDF I still have one on a shelf in the basement. > I think they were separate devices, which probably means that they > likely had separate serial ports to talk to each of them. Did they > support some sort of pass through? Or did they really require two > serial ports on the host? Yes (though the USD 801 ACU could be controlled by a parallel port _or_ a serial port) In our case, our product had a sync serial port to talk the the Host (implemented with either a COM 5025 or a Z8530). To run the 801 ACU, we soaked up an async port on the VAX as well. Sometime after 1990, I added V.25bis support to our product so we could control autodialers of the day. -ethan
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 06/04/2019 09:45 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > Does anyone have any experience working with modems that didn't include > internal / auto dialers? > Yes, Novation cat, Hays, and a few others. Dial the phone and put it in the cradle or flip a switch. Most of the 110/300boaud bel 101 and bell103 modems were "manual". Keep in mins the hardware for auto dial required some for of micro and that was a post 1974 thing for the most part. A few before that had a lot of TTL state machine to do that. They obviously weren't cheap. > They came up in a conversation in a newsgroup and I realized that I know > of them, but know virtually nothing about them. > > I think they were separate devices, which probably means that they > likely had separate serial ports to talk to each of them. Did they > support some sort of pass through? Or did they really require two > serial ports on the host? The dialer was often not at all as it was the human that dialed the phone. I know of none that did both functions that required a second serial port. For example the DEC ealy modems required the user to dial the phone and pushing a button would connect it. THe DEC modem had a protocal was different from the later ATDT (Hays modems). My first dial up was 1969, Bell 103 external to the TTY. Later versions had rotary dial or touch tone and the modem in the TTY stand. My first modem was a box about 12x8x2.5 inches and it was an all analog modem good for 110/300 baud and it required connection to the phone line (pre-modular connector) and you dialed the various (and relatively scarce) BBSs and when you heard the tone hit the switch that put the modem on the phone line and you would see the carrier and data lamps do their thing. That was 1978ish. A modem that could dial was maybe 1983-5 or so at affordable prices (under 300$) for 300 baud. Allison
Re: Modems and external dialers.
On 6/4/19 9:45 PM, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote: > Does anyone have any experience working with modems that didn't include > internal / auto dialers? > > They came up in a conversation in a newsgroup and I realized that I know > of them, but know virtually nothing about them. > > I think they were separate devices, which probably means that they > likely had separate serial ports to talk to each of them. Did they > support some sort of pass through? Or did they really require two > serial ports on the host? > > > It's been a long time since I saw one (I used to have a bunch in my collection, actually). And not all of them were separate. Some were ion a single box. DEC had some and AT&T and a few third party companies. bill
Modems and external dialers.
Does anyone have any experience working with modems that didn't include internal / auto dialers? They came up in a conversation in a newsgroup and I realized that I know of them, but know virtually nothing about them. I think they were separate devices, which probably means that they likely had separate serial ports to talk to each of them. Did they support some sort of pass through? Or did they really require two serial ports on the host? -- Grant. . . . unix || die
