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Jim Longley always gets me thinking about my formative years.

In 1967, the band Buffalo Springfield published a song titled "For What It's Worth."

Selected lyrics:

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
...
There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
...
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9PiEgYYUU" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Lyrics: http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/forwhati.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Wonky analysis: http://www.reasontorock.com/tracks/for_ ... worth.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

- Jim

That got played a lot aboard ship, but being a country fan by then, I barely noticed it, same with "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" so much so that many years later someone mentioned Stevie Nicks in a conversation and I asked "Who's he?"

I think, the 50s and 60s were a great time to grow up, at least for someone with my sense of curiosity. I flunked my way through school, but could send and receive Morse Code at just under 20 words per minute, taught First Aid and Water Safety for the Red Cross (I was too young to be certified as an instructor at the time, so I "assisted.") and was elected an officer in a volunteer fire department during my senior year of high school. By the 70s I was married with a couple of kids and working hard to raise them and keep ahead of the bills, that kind of put curiosity on the back burner.

I was the site technician for three nodes on the NY State Education and Research Network, installed them, maintained them, upgraded, upgraded, upgraded, added them to ARPANET, and had what we now know as email, and a dialup modem that was almost as big as a VCR, and went 300 bits per second on a 150 bauds signal. Curiosity got going again.

It's been an interesting life, and it ain't over yet.

jimlongley wrote:... a dialup modem that was almost as big as a VCR, and went 300 bits per second on a 150 bauds signal.

That evolution through 110, 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 56,000, to DSL, etc., is just amazing.

- Jim

seamusTX wrote:

jimlongley wrote:... a dialup modem that was almost as big as a VCR, and went 300 bits per second on a 150 bauds signal.

That evolution through 110, 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 56,000, to DSL, etc., is just amazing.

- Jim

Hey, 150 bauds was blazing fast compared to the 56.5 that the 60wpm TDDs went.

56k is still amazing to me.

Low baud rates are fine for real-time typing back and forth. Graphics drove the need for speed.

- Jim

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning" - who said it?

Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, in Apocalypse Now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPXVGQnJm0w" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Who doesn't know that?

- Jim

seamusTX wrote:Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, in Apocalypse Now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPXVGQnJm0w" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Who doesn't know that?

- Jim

Good question! Who,indeed, does know that and when did you know it?

seamusTX wrote:Low baud rates are fine for real-time typing back and forth. Graphics drove the need for speed.

- Jim

Bit rates? A baud is already a rate, saying "baud rate" is like saying "MPH per hour"

Sorry, just had to get in the thinly disguised personal attack.

seamus wrote "...300, 1200, 2400, 4800...
It was 1977 and I had just gone to work for a company that no long exists.
I was hooked to a local network running 2400 baud.
I was amazed. 2400 baud was faster than I could type.
--Hoot

jimlongley wrote:Sorry, just had to get in the thinly disguised personal attack.

Whatever happened to that "an armed society is a polite society" canard?

And how did this thread turn into a discussion of communication terminology?

- Jim

Yes, indeedy. What goes around comes around. Unfortunately.

---Well come on all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again,
he got himself in a terrible jam, way down yonder in Vietnam(read Afghanistan),
put down your books and pick up a gun, we're gunna have a whole lotta fun.

----now come on mothers throughout the land, pack your boys off to vietnam,
come on fathers don't hesitate, send your sons off before its too late,
be the first one on your block, to have your boy come home in a box

CHORUS-- and its 1,2,3 what are we fightin for?
don't ask me i don't give a dam, the next stop is Vietnam,
and its 5,6,7 open up the pearly gates. Well there aint no time to wonder why...WHOPEE we're all gunna die.

--Vietnam Song by Country Joe and the Fish

jimlongley wrote:...A baud is already a rate, saying "baud rate" is like saying "MPH per hour"

As one sailor to another, what really turns me off is someone talking or writing about "knots per hour."

Jim

My first "modem" was a 110bps acoustic coupler, the size of a large toaster and demanded the then-ubiquitous shape of telephone handset. And it was amazing.

Jim's a smidgeon older than I am, but I was living in Southeast Asia by 1967, and music trends seemed to filter down to us a bit more slowly. Everything seemed a year behind the curve: Cream, Zeppelin, you name it.

Speaking of people who have achieved an age of wisdom and maturity, someone we all know celebrates an important birthday tomorrow. I'm socked-in with two different deadlines, or I'd drive down to Pearland to wish him well in person.

seamusTX wrote:

jimlongley wrote:Sorry, just had to get in the thinly disguised personal attack.

Whatever happened to that "an armed society is a polite society" canard?

And how did this thread turn into a discussion of communication terminology?

- Jim

I think someone should study thread drift, there seems to be some sort of curve involved, but I'll bet it could be expressed in algebraic notation.

On another note, according to Nyquist and Shannon, a standard telephone line will support 2400 bauds. A baud is a signal element per second, and there may be more than one bit per signal element. Back in the day, a bit might be exactly related to a baud, but once the number of bits per second got to the number of bauds, in order to go faster, it became necessary to find a way to put more then one bit in each signal element.

Without getting even shallowly into the subject, think of a telephone line as a two dimensional square, and the signal that is passing through it does not fill the whole space. A telephone conversation is just so, while a 2400 bauds signal actually fills the space, but not all of it at the same time.

Along comes Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and two signals at a time are sent, in one signal element, and 4800bps results, and then more QAM schemes result in 9600bps, and more, until we finally reach (supposedly) 56kbps. At 56k, the number of bits per baud has reached a theoretical maximum as well as one of those limits that are built in.

At 56k the bit rate is right at the DS0 level of the North American Digital Heirarchy and that means that breaking that (analog) signal up for transport and the digital network causes error problems in some absolutely normal circum stances.

Cable TV and Fiber Optic networks use QAM schemes that enable even higher bit rates, but that's a really stretchy thread drift.

And besides, I'm retired from that stuff.

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