Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: Bowdon on February 05, 2023, 02:51:27 PM
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I've noticed when reading tech forums these days that the once outliers now seem to hold the majority.
When TV/Monitors started to become bigger and better, there was always one or two people who always wanted to buy the most cutting edge visual technology, even if they couldn't fully utilise it on there own setup. Most people back in the day would call it a waste of money because there wasn't the high quality films to use the visuals, or the games made to use all of the monitors features.
I think its a generational mind set as we used to use technology that was never fully fit for purpose. But we put up with it and squeezed the best performance out of it. The modem instruction forums testify to that! ;)
We of that camp seem to be outnumbered these days by the ones who want the latest cutting edge technology immediately, even though there isn't the applications to deal with it.
I don't think many appreciate what they have got these days as much as us who went through the early days of technology and have seen it develope and advance.
Someone who as never exprienced even a 56K modem can't fully appreciate a FTTP connection, in my opinion.
/rant
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How about 2800kbs modem :lol:
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Someone who as never exprienced even a 56K modem . . .
How about 2800kbs modem :lol:
The first modem I ever used was 300 bps (V21 specification). ;)
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I remember those also
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I don't think many appreciate what they have got these days as much as us who went through the early days of technology and have seen it develope and advance.
I don't think much has changed. In the past, the hardware wasn't great and each new generation resulted in big improvements.
Now the hardware can cope easily and other things like software limit the experience.
I think modem communication has just made it easier to find people with the same views as you.
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The first modem I had was a second hand one from the Woolworths factory offices. My Dad used to work there as a sub contractor and was friendly with all the staff.
The IT guy came around and set it up. I think that was 300 bps. A big black wide modem.. with all the lights flickering on and off. ;D
I think the appreciation factor as changed. Things that we were amazed by and now taken for granted.
It's an interesting technology world we live in at the moment. The only technology I haven't tried yet is VR.
One of the old retro guys (Steve Benway) I watch on Youtube uses VR Chat to go in a virtual world and imitate a cat. Hmm, that might interest some on here :)
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We of that camp seem to be outnumbered these days by the ones who want the latest cutting edge technology immediately, even though there isn't the applications to deal with it.
You aren't: the majority aren't enthusiasts, they use more mainstream tech and don't feel the need to talk about it online.
I suggest a look at the Steam hardware and software survey. The most commonly used 2 graphics cards are 3 generations old.
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The first modem I ever used was 300 bps (V21 specification). ;)
As was mine.
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I feel the opposite is true to some extent, they might have the most cutting-edge phone, but they will be watching TV shows and movies on it that were mastered in 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos surround sound, so are getting a vastly inferior experience to what the content is made more.
They also might have a 4K TV, but it will be bottom of the barrel which again can't properly display the content at its best.
Plus people would rather use bitrate starved streaming services for convenience and lose access to content, than the slight inconvenience of having to deal with physical media. It will simply be impossible to view older content at some point as its not popular enough to warrant the streaming service to pay for a license, even the studios who own it will drop it from their service to save storage space and it wont be available on physical media.
On the other hand it might not be an issue if Putin starts World War 3.
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As was mine.
In a light-straw, 62-type, equipment practice casing?
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Indeed so :)
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People that worked for. “Mars” had an acoustic coupler for a POTS handset. I think they were 300 asymmetrical.
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I used to work for a company that manufactured modems, Psion Dacom. I didn’t work in the modem bit though, but I once helped someone who did, a little bit. The first modem I ever saw was probably 9600 bps, at the end of the 1980s.
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GPO Modem 2B was my first modem experience as a BT Apprentice. Separate cards for PSU, modulate, demodulate, and control. And yes, 300 baud with settings such as attenuation adjusted with soldered wire straps on the cards. All discrete components with not a chip in sight. About the size of a largish tower PC laid on its side. ;D
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Seen at Bletchley computer museum. https://ibb.co/1JvqLKW
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Seen at Bletchley computer museum. https://ibb.co/1JvqLKW
That's the one! :)
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While I was programming, I first used an ASR33 with an acoustic coupler, then got upgraded to a leased line with a GPO Modem 2B and ICL Termiprinter. The modem worked well until the line got struck by lightning.
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Seen at Bletchley computer museum. https://ibb.co/1JvqLKW
That's exactly the device of which I was thinking in my Reply #9 (https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,27520.msg463246.html#msg463246), above.
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The generation before yours couldn't imagine the Internet or its predecessors unless in academia or military.
People take the current technology for granted and find the cutting edge stuff interesting. It was always so :)
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I do feel sad though that people can't appreciate what we have now because they didn't see the technology develop, but that's just the way things are. It seems only a minority have any interest or ability to imagine what it was like before their own childhood.
Its the same problems why people aren't up in arms at the idea they wont own anything, everything is on subscription and were living in a throwaway society where nothing can be repaired properly. Until it impacts their lifestyle, it never really occurs to them what they are losing.
Basically, most people will take for granted how things have "always been" in their lifetime to just be how it is, rather than spend the time to actually think about how things could be better. There's also a lot of apathy in those who do see where things have gone wrong, too much "there's nothing I can do about it" and people falling for infighting rather than realising if everyone works together we outnumber the people making the rules and CAN force changes.
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Everything is as a service. Few people can be bothered with buying multi terabyte spinning rust drives and hoarding content they can easily stream.
Copyright law is an issue and I suspect IP law will be further tightened going forward.
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Problem is they won't be able to easily stream it tomorrow.
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"we used to live in cardboard box in the middle of road. They don't know their born today." Monty Python. :lol:
I wonder if it depends on who and which generation... my thirty-ish son likes technology and history and so he likes looking into how things were in the past and how they are now.
Technology has made huge leaps. My first modem was Prism V23 1200/75 bps device that I used for accessing Prestel in about 1984. I also had a V21 300 bps acoustic coupler. At work for BT I saw 300 bps modems in grey boxes that we were providing to customers.
1995 I had a 9600 bps modem PC card for my laptop.
I had a US Robotics modem 56kbps in the early 2000s.
I could do e-mail on that, but the WWW would not have worked on it.
ADSL made watching and streaming content possible, but not possible to upload documents when working from home on 0.5Mbps uplink speed.
VDSL made a big difference to me trying to work from home on an 80/20 Mbps package.
Cheers,
Tony
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In 2003, I was happily accessing the WWW with my USR 56k dial-up modem, and I did also benefit greatly from the huge compression on LZW-compression-friendly data that is. That was, in my case, due to the ISP Demon offering MPPC compression
From the Wikipedia article on MPPC compression (http://"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Point-to-Point_Compression"):
The end result is that where V.44 may achieve a maximum of 4:1 compression (230 kbit/s) but is usually limited to 115.2 kbit/s, MPPC is capable of a maximum of 8:1 compression (460 kbit/s). MPPC also, given the far greater computing power at its disposal, is more effective on data than V.44 and achieves higher compression ratios when 8:1 isn't achievable.
Whilst being aware of the huge difficulties nowadays, those old numbers are very attractive and I’m inclined to put some thinking into compression for the 21C. Once again a solution needs to have compressor/decompressor modules in the machines at the endpoints of conversations, but the placement within the protocol stacks needs to be higher for the most part. As high as possible is always the solution that can, all things being equal, give the best compression given the application’s understanding of the conversation and context / state. This of course means the smallest range of applications that benefit. Fine examples being the http-compression such as gzip that already exists for http payload and http2 and http3’s own header compression, while in a different area, VJ-compression is a superb example of compression that is very effective because it is tuned to do just one thing, and do it very well. We do also need standards for the fallback case where say http cannot be used and so there we might benefit from having a standard for in-http compression. The utility of such a thing is probably decreasing since https / TLS probably perhaps ruin any chances of compression at a lower level working. Is that true? For this reason among others, QUIC ought to get a bolt-in module for payload compression as standard most definitely. And the small number of non-QUIC UDP apps should have a standard compressor module available to them
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This is part of the day job, I've assisted ISPs that've done this and even with both block compression and block caching the ratio didn't get above 1.3x. That across encrypted and non-encrypted.
On business traffic with just compression, even holding packets for a while to have more data to build a bigger dictionary, you're looking at 1.4-1.5x. That on non-encrypted stuff only. Improved substantially with caching.