> Scott Gardner wrote:
> > All this talk about ADSL, xDSL, and cable modems has gotten me
> > thinking, which has gotten me depressed. I just realized today that
> > the Internet is never going to seem any faster than it does right
> > now. Users have an amazing ability to fill available bandwidth.
>
> The content always rides the limit of tolerance.
>
> I think for most people if it takes more than 10 seconds to
> load a page at least enough to navigate, they will lose interest.
>
> The 10 seconds (or whatever measure of time) is the constant, not
> the size of the message, so you are correct that it will never
> be quicker.
>
> > (Who remembers when a bulletin board was some guy's Apple IIe with a
> > 300 baud modem and a floppy in each drive.)
>
> TWO DRIVES, THAT'S A POWER USER. My first modem was a 300 baud
> acoustic. On that topic, notice that loading a text based menu at
> 300 baud takes.... guess what, 10 seconds.
>
> Trevor Boicey
> Ottawa, Canada
> tboicey@brit.ca
> http://www.brit.ca/~tboicey/
>
I actually had the dual floppies for several years before we got the
10MB Sider external hard drive. At the time, 10MB was enough for me
to load *four* different operating systems on the Apple, and still
have more than enough space on all four partitions for programs.
I remember acoustic modems, but never owned one. My first modem was
a Hayes Micromodem IIe, a 300-baud internal unit that cost me a
little over $300. At the time, pretty much everybody had a 300 baud,
you were hot stuff if you had a 1200 baud, but good luck finding any
boards to connect to that had anything besides 300 baud modems, 2400
baud was for professional use only, and we heard RUMOURS of a
research lab up in Denver that had a 9600 baud modem!
I also have a computer magazine from 1984 that has an advertisement
for a 230MB hard drive. It's about the size of a modern rack-mount
computer, and sold for $23,400.
Scott
Scott Gardner
gardner@lwcomm.com
www.lwcomm.com/~gardner
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