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9600baud was revolutionary compared to 2400baud, text would load & scroll faster than you could read it!

Some sites has upload/download ratios - you could only download so much many files without uploading files, forcing an exchange rate.

There was a selection of download protocols you'd choose from, based on what your client support and the BBS supported: "KERMIT", "XMODEM", "YMODEM", "ZMODEM", and "JMODEM"

The better protocols supported batch, multi-file, compression, and resuming interrupted downloads - very important for when your session was interrupted by someone else in the house picking up the phone and trying to dial.

We had a second phone line installed for the modem; I learned how telephone wiring worked and re-wired the our phone outlets to use the correct lines.

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Worth mentioning since it's unimaginable to many kids today, in the BBS days, there was no multitasking. When you kicked off a download that took 40 minutes, you couldn't do anything at all with your computer while it was transferring. (at least for MS-DOS users, who were the vast majority) All you had on your screen was the progress meter, some statistics, and an abort button.

One day I came across a drop-in replacement for the zmodem transfer executable called "super zmodem" that let you play ascii Tetris while a transfer was going on and it blew my fricking mind.

In total I probably played more Tetris on that download screen than I did with my Nintendo Gameboy that only had three games.

Not if you used DESQview [1]. I think everyone serious about BBSing used DESQview to multitask in DOS. Then along came DESQview/X...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

Don't forget QEMM.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM

Yeah DESQview was interesting but you couldn't do everything in it because most serious programs would need all the resources of the computer, or they'd interfere with the IRQ assignments, leading to many crashes.

We're talking a time before even as much as cooperative multitasking of course. DESQview was multitasking programs that were not even meant for it.

Most people I knew didn't use it for that reason. If I really wanted to multitask while BBS'ing I'd just grab my Amiga I had beside the PC (which in itself actually had a real pre-emptive multitasking OS in ROM!).

There were a few programs that could do something else while a download was happening, like Telemate. It gave you at least a text editor and a file manager IIRC.

I did all my BBSing with my Amiga 500. I don't think I ever dared do too much multitasking while I was downloading. First, had to download to RAM:, because if you did something that involved disk, you could get a timeout. If you messed up the transfer, and you got disconnected, then you'd have to try and redial to get back on, which could take hours.

This is true... Disk access on Amiga was pretty crap, indeed. Often causing errors. And a HDD was super expensive so I didn't have one (just like a floppy drive was in the 8-bit age)

To be honest I didn't do much downloading at all in those days.. Just didn't have the patience for it. If I did do it I would do so over packet radio that I could just leave running all night. I had a third old PC just for that :)

Another reason that I didn't BBS much on my Amiga was that my modem was inside my PC on an ISA card for most of the time I used BBS'es. So I had to run a program on the PC to forward the modem data over a null-modem to the Amiga so either way I couldn't use the PC. So usually my PC was for modem use and the Amiga for other stuff.

Something else just flashed into my mind from my Amiga days, I believe right clicking paused the serial port. Depending on the protocol, it could resume, but I usually ran Ymodem-G, with little issues with data corruption, but could eek out an extra 5-10% data speed. It also didn't resume all that reliably, another mark against using Multi-tasking while downloading on the Amiga.

Huh I never experienced that at all.. Maybe with certain specific software?

I did blow up my serial ports several times with incorrectly wired cables. Luckily the first time I put the controller IC in a socket so the second time around it was easy :P But it was pretty sensitive to stuff like that. I've never managed to blow up a PC serial port and IIRC the controller IC was the same so I guess they used extra buffering or something.

I had an original IBM PC and I wrote most of my high school essays in Telemate's text editor. :)

I ran an Amiga BBS so had no issues with multitasking but a friend ran a DOS BBS so I lent him my copy of OS/2 Warp so he could use his computer while the BBS was running.

BBSing with an Atari 800 and a rotary phone at 300 baud was a whole other animal!

Many Fidonet mailers, like Binkley or T-Mail supported Hydra which was novel multi-streaming bidirectional serial protocol. You could download several files while uploading your outbound mail at the same time. It was very useful for those lucky possessed 28800 baud modems like ZyXEL Elite or US Robotics Courier (mid/late 90th).

You couldn't do anything unless you had software like Desqview. That was a revolution.

OS/2 was better. It had pre-emptive multi-tasking like the Amiga, but with memory protection to prevent crashes. A friend ran a DOS BBS so I left him my OS/2 Warp so he could use his computer while the BBS was up.

Dont forget fucking with IRQs and DIP switches and jumpers to get that fancy 300 baud modem up and running so you could dial your best friend for a head-to-head game of Populous on your ever so amazingly awesome new EGA monitor! No more Cyan or Amber for this guy! 16 colors FTW!

EDIT: And oh yeah - please insert Game Disk #2

All this talk of IRQs and DIP switches and no one has mentioned N81 or E71. There was a time when you had to pay attention to the parity before dialing. Also, it looks like 8N1 and 7E1 have become the more common notation now.

Also haven't heard anyone mention that early manual terms required using "ATDT" to dial with a touch tone phone because the default dialing method was rotary back then and there was no GUI.

Having lived through the modem era and having run a BBS, I've never seen N81 or E71 before. You must have been running a particular piece of software that made up it's own nomenclature.

The grandparent is talking about parity, data bits, and stop bits[0]. Different serial communications protocols had different framing needs. If you were dealing with PC-based BBS's, for the most part, you wouldn't have run into anything aside from N81. I didn't see much E71 outside of X.25 networks.

[0] https://www3.nd.edu/~lemmon/courses/ee224/web-manual/web-man...

You must have been using DOS or Windows. We Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga users had no such IRQ, DIP switch or jumper issues. Also, the Amiga wasn't limited to 16 colors.

Well look at the dead technology on this husk of a 'human'

“Mom, don’t pick up the phone!”

Nitpick - Baud rate refers to the number of symbols sent by the modem per second, you can't send more than 8000 symbols per second through an analog phone line, as they are sampled at 8 Khz. You can sent multiple bits per symbol, which all modems did. By utilizing a direct digital connection to the phone network, an ISP could send up to 53 kbits/second using all 8 bits of each sample, minus a few for transitions that weren't allowed because of cross talk with other phone lines.

Thus, the fastest modems were 8000 baud.

PS: Yes, it was amazing to see the text actually flow / smooth scroll up the screen for the first time in my life, way faster than I could read it when it got a US Robotics Courier HST modem.

Ah... memories of technical arguments past. :-)

Some clarification for those who might not be familiar:

One way to illustrate the difference is to consider communicating with physical signal flags, where there's a limit to how fast you can raise and lower the flags. The baud rate is how fast you can change the flag. The bit rate is how fast the information flows.

Say you have only a black flag and a white flag, and you let the black flag be 1 and the white flag 0. In this case, the baud rate and the bit rate are the same, as each flag transition represents 1 bit of information.

Now suppose you have also have a red flag and a green flag. You could let white be 00, black be 01, red be 10, and green be 11. The baud rate (rate of running the flags up and down the pole) remains the same, but the bit rate (number of bits encoded by a flag) has doubled.

Analog modems used all kinds of tricks to encode more than one bit on each symbol transition. Later models sometimes even had built-in data compression and error correction (e.g. the Telebit modems, which would actually simulate things like ZMODEM and UUCP g protocol to the computers, while using their own compression/correction mechanisms on the physical link).

Hehe yeah... 2400bps modems ran at 1200 baud. 33.4Kbps modems ran at 3400 baud (at most)

57600 baud (V.92) to be precise.

8000 Baud (Symbols/second)

According to the spec[1] for the "analog modem" (the one in your office, house, etc)

  6.2 Symbol rate

  The upstream symbol rate shall be 8000 symbol/s derived from the digital network.

1 - https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-V.92-200011-I/en

57600 baud is incorrect. It was 57600 bps which was achieved over a 3200 baud connection by utilizing sophisticated signaling and compression.

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Modem-HOWTO-23.html

9600 baud definitely felt like a quantum leap! I remember upgrading from 2400 to 9600. It was huge.

And then there was the commoners and the elites: Those who had USR Sportster modems and the superior USR Couriers.