@sabi I can’t really remember. 14.4 was the zyxel and it was really fast. The one before that … i don’t really remember. It was an import to be faster then what you could buy here 👀 so maybe it was 9600 or so … i voted for 9600 - but maybe it was just 2400 🤷‍♂️

@sabi What is a "modem"?

@sabi back in the days…

@sabi ISDN with 64k :-)

@sabi I had a 2400 card as a hand-me-down from somewhere but I don't think I ever got that working. So I went with 9600

@sabi the first one I used away 110, the first one I owned was a 19.2 trailblazer…

@sabi
14,4 with ISDN, and if we wanted to go faster, we used channel bundling, but then we couldn't make phone calls anymore.

@sabi @Linkshaender Does an acoustic coupler count as a modem in this survey?

@sabi I had a 1200/75 modem for a while – that’s 75 upload

@sabi Maybe ask first if it was an acoustic coupler, classic modem, ISDN modem, DSL/Cable modem or something exotic.

@sabi Technically my intro to the internet was in the transition period... my grandma had a 56k, which I voted for, but at home we had DSL by then. So kinda both.

@sabi My first modem was a a used decommissioned military modem in a grey 19" enclosure about 15 cm high. Rock solid and quite heavy, with a large printed circuit board filled with discrete electronics and lots of coils. I bought it around 1976 for 200 Dutch guilders and used it with a (borrowed) ADM-3A terminal to dial from home into the university's PDP11/45 running Bell Labs UNIX 6th Edition.

@sabi @vilmoskoerte Makes me think — my current (VDSL) modem is rougly 100000 times as fast as my first one. That sounds like a lot, but given that it's been about 30 years, it is behind Moore's law.

@sabi 2400 baud US Robotics. Costed a fortune. And the phone bills on top of that...

@sabi you’re missing 19.2

@sabi #fediverse is certainly older than I thought!! 😊

This one made me feel right at home 😁

@sabi My first modem had several speeds. 300/300 full duplex, 1200/75 full duplex and 600/600 half duplex.. Based on a TCM3105 from TI. You couldn’t buy modems so a American friend bought me the chip and I built a modem myself. Taped out a circuit board and sold a few hundred modems over the next few years.

@sabi i selected 300. But the first modem had you put the normal handset over a holder. It was not fast ;)

@sabi 300 baud acoustic coupler for me. It was quite horrible really and it didn't get much use. I got a lot of use out of a 2400 bps modem a few years later. This offered a huge increase in speed, but more importantly it gave an even larger increase in the reliability of connection.

@sabi 64 kBit via ISDN

@sabi Old I am: 300.

That was the first one I owned. I did use a teletype with a roll of paper and cups for the phone before that but I don’t know how fast it was.

@sabi I checked 300, but the first dial-up data communications device I ever used, in 1967, was a Teletype ASR 33 with a built-in 110 modem… The first I ever had in my residence, though, was a 300 acoustic coupler.

@sabi Last option, but I got cable in 96 when I was 15 or 16 years old 🤷

@sabi I grew up just as normies were invading all the cool parts of the internet, so I vaguely remember a time "before" the internet, and then it was straight to 56k.

@sabi Compuserve anyone?

@sabi However, my first internet was a dial in shell account on a unix box that had a dozen or so modems attached to it, once of which was 300. This is where I learned that I can read faster than 300.

@sabi This was on a 100Mbps connection. 😂

@sabi my parents had dialup when I was a kid, but I never knew any numbers about it, just the terrible noises

Baud were the exclusive province of my late grandfather, who was an electrical engineer

@sabi first modem was 14k4, but I left home probably a month after that and got a 100 mbit line at my new university. Four years later I bought an ISDN and was appalled the rest of the country was still there. Guess I was spoiled very early on.

@sabi
No modem, 64k ISDN.
@vagrantc

@sabi

Fiber optic is so much faster,.

@sabi@infosec.space Technically we had 56k, but our phone lines were ancient relics from the party line days, so it would never negotiate anything higher than 14.4.

Didn't see anything faster than that until they started repairing the phone lines as part of an upgrade to DSL.

@sabi 300 baud acoustic coupler. hehe

@sabi Old-timer here. IIRC, my TRS-80 Model I MicroDesigns MDX expansion circuit board ($300? kit ordered from 80 Micro ad?) had built-in 300 baud modem (with a funky wire I may have connected to the phone line by twisting conductors together - kludge city! 😉😆) #TRS80

@sabi I remember a sysop of a local BBS breaking in to chat with me before I'd even logged in, because I was the only one still on 1200.

@sabi

I love how this is also an age distribution, by proxy, of folks who voted in this poll.

Now I need to hear the dial up noise

@sabi in my head it was 200, so I picked 300

@sabi 1k2 via Packetradio 😅

@sabi My first was a *fraction* of a 1200, through a multiplexer used by at least a dozen people, so really less than 300.

@sabi I seem to remember as a pre-teen trying to put one phone handset to another having read it in a book or computing magazine

@sabi 56k BUT it was a Winmodem so when I switched to Linux there were only unstable drivers that could do at most 33600! So I dual-booted for a while mostly because of large* downloads!

*multi-megabyte downloads like individual mp3s!

@sabi Acoustic coupler. Also phone booth. Epson PX-8 hacking into JANET. Those were the days.

@sabi
This one

@sabi I like the spike at 14k4 because to my best memory that was the speed-du-jour when the Web came up. Everything before that was BBS only

@sabi ISDN card. it was free on sunday so my download manager was busy that day 😇. technically there were two channels, so i could have used 128k but my parents probably wouldn't have liked that. :P

@sabi not my first but for a while at one job we had a homebrew arrangement of twin bonded 38400 modems using PPP, so 76,800 total. Just as broadband was ramping up.

@sabi I remember the first time I tried to download a 1 MB file, on 14.4k dialup in a remote glen in the Scottish Highlands. It took an hour to download 99% of it, and then the connection dropped!

@sabi
It was for a Commodore 64. It had no dialup capability. You dialed the number on your rotary phone and whe you heard the squeal quickly plug the phone line into the modem.
@catsalad

@sabi a network engineer only knows 9600 🙈

@sabi 1200 baud modern my dad brought home from work to do email. I used it for BBSes, but mainly for MUDs via a dial-up telnet gateway. When he brought home a Toshiba laptop with a 2400 baud modem, I strongly preferred that both for the higher speed, and the fact I could use it downstairs when my parents were sleep. My first computer of my own had an internal 2400 baud modem.

@sabi

I don't remember, but most of those numbers look familiar.

@sabi @catsalad My first was a 110/300. Those were the days!!

@sabi @smurthys I remember when we upgraded to 56k - I thought we were FLYING :blobfoxcrylaugh: