Turn your key, sir!
@p@fsebugoutzone.org @Jdogg247@fsebugoutzone.org It's nostalgia bait, but it still holds up as movie for me. Re-watched it earlier this year.
@p@fsebugoutzone.org @Jdogg247@fsebugoutzone.org i started my modem shenanigans in the 2400/9600 baud era, so the 200? baud with acoustic coupling just seemed high tech, lol. Poor zoomers will never grok war-dialing and getting a hit on a university unix. 
I had a 56k winmodem, totally hopeless. It was all ethernet after that, totally hopeless.
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
I had the opportunity to use a 2400 baud modem. A friend gave it to me when my faster Sportster got fried, soon after I got myself a Sportster patched to Courier, that thing was amazing!
Later I was also given the iconic 56k external Courier, but my friend took it back, I've never really owned one.
And then ADLS was starting to become common: easily reflashable D-Link thingies, that was actually fun too!
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
I did BBS, I did Fido, early Web, including DOS browsers, such as Arachne, I even had the rare opportunity to use UUCP, (ex-) Soviet countries had this Relcom thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relcom
So when I was reading about it in the books later, it didn't feel like something that only exists in the books, which I think is great.
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
I was never a prominent part of greater Fido — mostly read-only, I don't think I ever posted much. We had such a term as FTN: Fido Technology Network — smaller networks built on the same stack. There were plenty of these, everyone participated in 3-4 I think 😁
These were smaller communities, usually built around some hobbies, there was even one — I kid you not, for Depeche Mode fans. There people were also into Industrial music — nice crowd actually!
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
It was a great way to discover some new music, borrow CDs/vinyls.
Smaller networks had regular offline meetups — usually just getting together to talk and have a couple of beers, some had more elaborate events.
This is how I took part in my first street protest BTW — national telephony operator wanted to introduce time-based plans (it was flat monthly rate before that), this was going to make things expensive and disrupt the communities — so of course no one liked it.
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
Funnily, they were claiming that using modems led to greater wear and tear for telephone lines and equipment at their hubs — all the usual bullshit 😂
I wasn't even realising at the time how great it all was! Internet allowed for greater anonymity — which I was more comfortable with, I was always paranoid, but it still wasn't as synthetic as we have it nowadays 😩
> FTN: Fido Technology Network — smaller networks built on the same stack.
Oh, yeah, I can imagine that sort of thing also involved some overlap.
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
Yeah, I think at some point someone realised that and implemented it in the software that was interacting with modem, doing calls and file transfers: this node we're calling has several addresses in different networks so we can exchange mail for those too — in one go. This helped reduce the redundant calls.
@p @Jdogg247 @miscbrains
These mailer programs got pretty advanced actually, there was T-Mail, later there was The Brake, and there was another one that I can't recall the name of — it even had support for translations, which wasn't common for software of that time at all. And it had "hacker" language pack with humorous messages like "Boring… no one's calling us" — reading the logs was quite entertaining 🤣
> And it had "hacker" language pack with humorous messages like "Boring… no one's calling us"
See, when I was coming up, "hacker" language pack meant 1337speak; I don't know what it means nowadays.
> I did Fido,
Oh, you know Tom Jennings is on fedi now?
> Relcom
That's cool!