Blast from the past... Reader and friend Simon M. passes along this video of a news report from 1981, talking about the wonders of online news reading.
I don't recall ever seeing this particular news report, but it could have been about me: I was reading the news online in 1981, for the first time. At that time, I was a big user of
CompuServe, the then-giant of the online world (this considerably predates the Internet).
Back then, we connected to CompuServe through
a 300 baud modem, faster than the 110 baud acoustic coupled modems shown in this video. We also connected to privately-run, free “bulletin board services” (BBS), and on those we could connect as fast as 700 baud using
a proprietary modem from a now-defunct company with a memorable name: Potomac Micro Magic Inc., or PMMI for short (image at left). Their modems were S-100 boards crammed with discrete components, marvels of electronics ingenuity for their time. I was amazed to find that
the manual for that ancient thing is available online, and reading through it brought that board right back to life for me, along with some of the norms for the day. Back then, we had to use FCC-registered “couplers” to legally connect a modem to the phone line; that was a hangover from the fully regulated telephone lines of just a few years earlier, when it was illegal to connect
anything to the phone lines unless you bought it from AT&T. Then I had to laugh at the extensive programming examples in the manual – in several flavors of Basic, and in 8080 assembly language. What a different world back then!
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