300 baud putting in a strong showing as is 2400! Absolute classics!

@sabi
Where do I put sending a ZX Spectrum cassette tape by snail mail?

@sabi
100 baud acoustically coupled phone modem... Then moved up to a 300 baud when I got into junior year of high school. Then I got really fancy and moved to a 2400 baud modem while I was in the Navy.

@sabi acoustic coupled FTW

@sabi we had an audio-coupled 300 baud, but that was my mom’s. My first computer had a 2400bps, so that’s what I voted for.

@sabi I hid the fact I had a modem from my folks for a couple of years.

@sabi

The first modem I paid for with my own money was a 2400, but I've used 1200 kit for work. God, maybe even that 1200/75 filth.

@sabi

I mean, I think the first one I could remember was 14 4. possibly had one, slower, before that.

@sabi Actually it was just 110.

@sabi internal USR Sportster 33.6. Memories :-)

@sabi

..... Why is the curve taking on the Cisco Logo?

I mean, yes, Cisco took that image for a reason, but still.

@sabi first I used was a 300 baud VICMODEM that I borrowed from a friend for a couple months and I was immediately hooked on BBSes. The first modem I owned was a 1200 baud Commodore 1670 that I bought used at a computer swap meet, which I used with a C64 for a couple years and then with a 128D for another couple years, until I got an Amiga, when I finally upgraded to 9600.

@sabi first was 110 baud on an ASR 33 teletype. we were so excited when we got the 300 baud modem!

@sabi
used it all at work, at home, 14.4, I guess

@sabi "omg the designers want to send another huge file?? when will they realise that not all of us have 56k???"

@sabi Acoustic coupler 300baud terminal into CMU edu from my dorm, circa 1986

@sabi

300 with a BOOST toggle for 1200.

@sabi 56k but over a radio "landline", whatever the hell that thing was called. Losses so bad it took five attempts to just connect.

I still somehow managed to accumulate an MP3 library!

@sabi @Meyerweb oh the memories. I remember getting a 56k and thought it was blazing fast!

@sabi compression hardware doesn’t count right?

@sabi acoustic coupler. slow.

@sabi what makes this feels especially accurate is the smaller numbers for 1200, 9600 and 33.6. The all had fairly short runs before being topped by successor speeds.

@sabi Somewhere between 14.4-33.6 kb/s.

@sabi First I owned was 2400, but first I used was the old phone in rubber cupped cradle with fake woodgrain 300baud one.

@sabi I am not very tech, so don't recall what my first modem at home was, but it ran through my phone line and it was well before the web--before hard drives on PC, for that matter. But I generally used the T3 line at school.

@sabi I started with < 300 baud phone hooks but

@sabi

Remarkable number of us old-timers! I like this.

@sabi https://github.com/kamalmostafa/minimodem

@sabi All of us using ASR-33s and the like were 110.

@sabi I’m an outlier, because even though I first started using the internet in 1993, I’ve never had dialup, only broadband.

@sabi The first one I personally owned was probably 14.4, but in my first job in IT one of my duties was overseeing a university's dwindling stock of 300-baud modems, mostly used by faculty to check their email.

@sabi @feoh I did not own a 110 acoustic coupler but I used one when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

@sabi @Meyerweb I had not realized so many of these numbers have taken up permanent residence in my memory (“fourteen-four”, “twenty-eight-eight”)

@sabi 300/75 with a rubber-cup acoustic coupler with a GPO 706 rotary dial telephone. I feel zero nostalgia.

@sabi Looking forward to seeing the final results! It seems every time speed quadruples, there’s a boost in votes (yet the next speed in the order is less). I wonder, if the trend holds, what drove it? Cost? Market? Services? Fun and interesting poll! 🙂

@sabi when I went from 300 to 1200, it seemed like such a waste...

I couldn't even type that fast, so why!?...

@sabi Midcentury Modem (not my first, but my oldest)

@sabi
Having to go with 1200, although that was only the speed in one direction. Prism VTX-5000 was 1200/75 baud.

@sabi the first modem I remember was 14.4 but my mom ran a boutique software consultancy for a minute so there was probably older stuff in the house

@sabi

Doghouse BBS
300/1200/2400
n,8,1
24/7

Call or Die!

--cubic dog

@kirch

@sabi That update from 300 to 1200 baud was still the most exciting bandwidth increase I've ever had

@sabi

1200/75

@sabi Technically, my first "modem" would have been a suitcase sized teletype with a thermal printer and acoustic coupler. I think it would have struggled with 110 bps.

@sabi I have no clue, I was to young to remember anything besides PPP and the noises

@sabi 64k (ISDN - we wanted to be online and make phone calls at the same time)

@sabi 56k but on the line I was able to acquire a usage permit for, I was only ever able to get slightly over 19k2bps, and since I used it with a slower 386 laptop for the first time I used setserial to configure the COM port down to that so the CPU could keep up with the interrupts

@sabi
I voted 1200, but symetry was kind of unusual back then, my first modem was 1200 downlink but only 300 up.

Kind of ok, things were mostly text only, and I read at least four times as fast as I typed ...

@sabi USRobotics Sportser Voice 33.6k

Sold it to a client at some point so they could use it to access online bank (which ignored certificate expiry when used with direct dial), then got it back once the bank removed dial-in and only supported Internet connection.

@sabi I believe we may have had less than 56k at some point while I was using the internet but I wasn't super aware of internet speeds till I was a bit older.

@sabi
I voted 1200, but honestly it might have been 2400. It wasn't even used for your fancy interneting with pictures! It was all telnet. Text-based adventure, if you can imagine. I used to help dad connect to the telnet bank and pay the bills. The very future was offered to us in the comfort of our home. Then it turned into... *gestures frantically at everything* whatever the fuck this is. :blobcat_wonder:

@sabi 28.8kbps of pure screaming!

When I moved to my first 56k modem I was like a god among friends

@sabi 14.4 however this was firmly in the time when 56k was standard because, Jesus Christ With a Varta Cell Up His Bum, Time Computers of the UK were just hatefully atrocious.

@sabi I've only ever known WinModems... those are all 33.6 or 56k, right?

@sabi is 110 considered fancy?

@sabi 300 was the second one. The first one was 110 baud, connected to a teletype in the High School's 'Computer Room'. It was a loud, slow way to do computing, but it was still awesome.

@sabi as far as i remember, we were on 56K before they built out the municipal fiber net to roughly everyone, in the late 90s/eqrly 00s.
can't remember if that was the first though. :)

@sabi
I worked professionally with 300 baud acoustic couplers and I didn't want any part of them!

@sabi my first was 2400, it came with my Packard Bell 486.

now, my first that WORKED? that's a different question, and that one was a 14.4

@sabi @paul_ipv6 Glad to see my fellow 300s representing!

@sabi funny since mine was less than 300, but I picked 300

@sabi 300 but not cradle. By the time I could afford one I got a fancy direct-connect one

@sabi @Meyerweb DTMF OR GTFO!

@sabi I voted for the first one I ever bought (Avatex 1200baud direct connect) but the first one I used was a 300baud acoustic coupler at school. And I have an old 75/110 coupler I scavenged off an old TTY.

@sabi My personal first was 300 baud.

But I did use 110 baud between a Decwriter terminal and a mainframe hundreds of miles away.

@sabi Technically 14.4 in terms of dialing and using a modem myself - but I have sharp memories of my dad firing up a 300 baud modem with an 8-bit Atari 130XE. And actually still happen to have that exact 300 baud modem in a box... somewhere.

@sabi I don't actually know, but given that I first went online at university before the internet was even really a thing, I'm guessing 300 was probably my own first one.

@sabi @feoh I'm old.

@sabi But quickly 14k4, 33k6, 56k, en ISDN TA before broadband.
First broadband 768/128...

@sabi

Gzzzzt, g'dang g'dang gsssshhhhhhhhh g'dang.

@sabi 300 baud with my Commodore 64. It came with a trial subscription to a commercial service called QLink, which (IIRC) was a predecessor to GEnie or one of the later generation commercial things.
Later, when I had an Amiga 500 with a 2400 baud modem and a CompuServe account, I'd often connect at 300 baud anyway, since it cost extra to connect at 2400 baud. I still managed to run up some eyewateringly large bills.

@sabi

we had an "acoustic coupler" at home but that was something my dad connected way back when and did all the manual switch flipping on the back of the thing.

1200 was the first real modem modem

@sabi IIRC, my first was a Bell 101 modem, featuring a blazing 110 baud. It was on a Teletype ASR 33, and used to talk to a GE-435 time sharing system, circa 1971.

@sabi dial up cradle modem

@sabi In my second job out of college (circa 1997), I used my then-ancient 1200 baud modem to connect to a newspaper editorial mainframe whose modem could *only* connect at 300 baud. I had to lifeboat off a few dozen in-process stories so that we could load them onto our new writing-and-pagination system.

@sabi 9600

@sabi Mine really was 110 baud.

@sabi I was once present when a 300 baud modem was being used. The phone’s handset was placed in a cradle that listened and replied like a person would.

@sabi Ok so here's the thing

My parents had dialup up until about 2009 or so, when they got a cellular modem, which was their sole form of internet until about 2014. It was _worse_ than the dial up was, and more expensive, but we were moving a lot

However _I_ didn't get internet until 2014 when they got free ethernet, and didn't need the cell modem anymore. It would only work in one room of the house, before 8 AM, and would still only load text most of the time

I got LAN a year later, luckily

@sabi 110 Audio Coupler, not on the list.

@sabi it was indeed 1200/75 (French Minitel used as a modem + terminal to connect to a connection concentrator)

@sabi I don't remember and made a guess instead of looking up availability in the year I got it. I DO remember the absolutely massive phone bill I got the first month due to the bonkers per minute charge on my dorm room phone line. 😂 Had to institute a self-imposed monthly modem time cap!

@sabi 300 on a C64 accessing GEnie. I loved every screech, every long distance minute, and every time someone else in the house picked up the extension. Those were the wild west days of "online".

@sabi 110

@sabi my memory is hazy on the subject.

idk, phone line frequency?

@sabi 14.4 at first and later got a 56k when parents bought a new pc. At the time, it was as though God himself descended from the heavens and blessed my internet speeds.

@sabi @paul_ipv6 110. Acoustic coupler. It was awesome.

@sabi 14.4, which I used exclusively for checking my Juno e-mail.

@sabi shout out to my old VICMODEM

@sabi
Doing my part for the 4 young people on Fedi and voting “I've only ever known broadband” :P

Although I am in the impossibly small group of people that have only ever known broadband for “real internet” but have used modems for small private/point-to-point networks, so I guess I could've voted for my “first modem” still… (28.8 kbit/s for the record)

@sabi First one I actually remember was definitely 56.6K, though of course it only ever connected at 48.8 (or 33.6 on a bad day) because phone lines are a thing. I think I may have used worse on my grandmother's or father's systems when very very young, but not sure.

I will never, so long as I shall live, ever forget what the dialing/connection tones sounded like, lol.

@sabi @futzle not our first but definitely the favourite in terms of turning it on (really needs sound on!)

@sabi Time to bring this one out again.

@sabi my first ever modem was not connected to the so called internet, so I've choosen 1200 bd and it was for Packet radio as an amateur radio OP

@sabi 150 baud (C64 mailboxing)

@sabi
I have used all of those. the first i definitely remember owning myself was 14.4k.

@sabi first modem was a hybrid modem/soundcard. Depending on boot time config, you could have 14.4k internet and working sound, or 28.8k internet and no sound

@sabi
110 first to use
14.4 first to own

@sabi my first was a 14.4, which was wired in a way that my parents' phone would ring every time it dialed.

But the slowest was 9600 over citizen band (CB) radio. Transfering data over multiple hops effectively split that speed in half every hop. And the 9600 was a theoretical value anyways.