Cockeyed Optimist

The last couple of days I have been rather frustrated because my internet service provider, with whom I have no quarrels at all, has been limiting my connection speed to the equivalent of dial-up.

They do this when you exceed your monthly download allowance (20 Gigs in my case - sounds a lot!), instead of charging you a premium for the excess usage. When you have become used to cable speeds (modest though they may be here in Australia), dial-up speeds seem impossibly slow.

And then I thought back to the time (1979) when I got my first computer, an Apple ][, and started using Compuserve (now that’s another bit of mixed nostalgia for you!). What I connected with then was an acoustic coupler that fitted onto my telephone handset; it ran at 300 baud, would you believe?

(I know I’m beginning to sound like Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen:

SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: House! You were lucky to live in a house!
We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor
was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Eh, you were lucky to have a room!
We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor!
Would ha' been a  palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip.
We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN: Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground
covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN: We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground;
we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky to have a lake!
There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN: Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank.
We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag,
eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day,
week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home
our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

I think you get the idea!)

Back to my actual on-line experiences.

Connecting to an overseas system like Compuserve meant that I had to get an account with Australia’s Overseas Telecommunications Commission, which was quite expensive and charged by volume. (I was recently divorced, so I was a bit insane anyway.)

I remember typing out a huge Pascal word-processor program (it had a similar approach to Runoff, and was called Prose), which I copied out of a UCSD Pascal newsletter because it would have cost an arm and a leg to download.

This ran on the UCSD Pascal system on my Apple, which was so immense that you had to expand the original 48K of memory to a mind-blowing 64K by installing a special card (yes, I do mean Kilobytes!).

If you’re not careful, I shall start telling you about my former colleague’s experiences at the University of New South Wales with the English Electric Deuce, which used mercury delay lines for memory!

So, enough nostalgia; tomorrow is another month, so I shall be back up to a decent speed!

Any similar reminiscences you would like to share here? Feel free!

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