On Jul 14, 2014, at 5:25 PM, Lisa Rabey wrote:

> "The cause of the problem is:
> /dev/clue was linked to /dev/null"
> 
> Teehee.
> 
> http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl


It's difficult to use the excuse 'solar flares' when your boss is (1) a solar physicist and (2) reads BOFH.

	http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/0000/bastard06.php


> On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> The only problem is that some people might have difficulty obtaining audio
>> modems that could be made to work with their cell phones...


So in um ... spring of 1995, I think it was ... we managed to get a car phone from Bell Atlantic (might've been Bell Atlantic-NYNEX at that point), and the phone had an RJ-11 jack on it.

... which of course meant that we had to see if we could hold up a modem connection while on the road.  Unfortunately, the best that we could manage to get was about 2400 baud for any extended periods.  We had our best transfer rates (9600 baud?) up near the NSA campus along the BW Parkway.

Mind you, this was in the days when modems topped out at 33.6k ('x2' and 'kFlex' didn't come along 'til a year or two later, then finally v90) ... the modem banks we were dialing into might've only been 14.4k or 28.8k.

This was also in the days of analog cell service, as PCS didn't come out 'til even later ... once it did, the sysadmin for the ISP I worked at got cables so he could dial out from what today we'd call a 'netbook' (back then it was just a really tiny laptop ... this was also the days when you could keep a computer on your lap without it crushing you (the 'portable' aka 'luggable' era) and it burning your crotch (the current 'notebook' era).

... but I still think we could pull off 1200 baud w/ an acoustic coupler over a cell phone, which is about the bare minimum for MUDs in the mid 1990s, and would've been fine for BBSes, as long as you weren't dealing in warez.

-Joe

ps.  wow, this whole conversation is making me feel old ... doesn't help that I blew my back out last week, so I was already feeling old before the day started.