1200 baud was good enough for me

When I bought my first computer (an IBM XT) I splurged and bought a 1200 baud modem instead of the 300 baud almost everyone else was buying. It was amazingly fast. It would download the posts from the BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems) faster than I could read. How could anyone have a need for anything faster than that?

It’s a good thing we didn’t have the anti-free speech bigot equivalents of the anti-gun Senators Feinstein and Schumer who stopped the sale of new magazines with more than a 10 round capacity. Otherwise we would be still stuck at 1200 baud instead of 15,500,000,000,000 baud:

To achieve these results, researchers from the Bell Labs facility in Villarceaux, France used 155 lasers, each operating at a different frequency and carrying 100 Gigabits of data per second. The team multiplied the number of lasers by their transmission rate of 100 Gigabits per second and then multiplied the 15.5-Terabit-per-second result by the 7,000-kilometer distance achieved. The combination of speed multiplied by distance expressed as bit per second.kilometers is a standard measure for high-speed optical transmission.

Of course I and others discovered the 1200 baud modems were way too slow when we started downloading porn–even if they were just 320 x 200 x 256 color .GIF files. Just think of the improvement in quality and speed at which we will be able get our porn once we have terabit data connections. That should come close to the needs for one of Quark’s holosuites. We just need to get the holographic emitters working.

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3 thoughts on “1200 baud was good enough for me

  1. MODEMS ARE DESIGNED ONLY TO TRANSMIT CHILD PORN!11!!111

    AND SOMEHOW BY TRANSMITTING KIDDY PORN AT SLOWER SPEEDS THE PROBLEM WILL JUST GO AWAY!!!111!!1

    Heh, gotta love the gun control numbers game. Because having a 10 round mag in a gun somehow negates my ability to do the mayhem with an “evil” 11 round mag…

    And slightly more on-topic, isn’t living in the future AMAZING!

    I’m still enjoying the hell out of cruising the web while riding the train or waiting for the wife to finish her shopping from damn near everywhere thanks to my handy smartphone!

  2. Weer’d; When we were kids, we’d often see speculations on TV or in our text books of how great it would be in “The Future” (as opposed now, when the future is shown as being bleak and deadly). I remember one of us kids asking our mother when “The Future” would arrive, ’cause we were anxious to take a ride in one of those 250 MPH nuke-powered cars or one of those flying cars or get one of them there robot house servants. Yes, now that it’s finally here, it is nice living in The Future. I just wonder when some enterprising firm is going to market a computer as the “PornMaster 5000”. Now we have people who want to ban WiFi and cell towers because of the evil and deadly RF “pollution” the “The Corporations, Man” are using to boost their evil and dastardly profiteering schemes.

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