Aww .... how quaint

[Saracen999]

Following on from a comment in another thread, I decided to download the software and drivers for one of my old scanners, an HP Scanjet 5590.

Despite this being old (I've had it, I'd guess, 12-15 years and it wasn't a new model then) it turns out it's still listed, like on Amazon, as about £750, new. Wow.

But that isn't the quaint bit.

I went to the relevant HP support page for the software suite for this, to find the recommendation that because of the size (a mahooossive 147MB - yup, a whole 147Meg), and this is the bit that tickled me ...

"DIAL-UP customers are advised to request this on CD".

I suspect HP may not have reviewed that page in a while.

I mean, CD?

And dial up??

I clicked download, pointed at the directory I wanted and clicked (in Firefox) "Save".

I then immediately, like in about 1 or at most 2 seconds, clicked the "downloaded" button, and there it was .... completed.

I wonder if I should have got the CD to save myself the inconvenience of waiting for 1.5secs, +/- 0.5s?


But seriously, a couple of points.

1) I remember those days well, including when some twerp in a US PR agency sent me a multi-MB press release by email, and on my dial-up it took over an hour and a half. Grrr. And it was nowhere near 147MB.

But just thinking back to comms 20 years ago makes me realise just how much we take for granted.


2) Huge, and I mean HUUUGGGGGEEEE kudos to HP for developing a product that, albeit pretty niche, was so damn good (and it is) at doing what it was designed for that it's still available all these years later. And still supported by HP. Now that is support. MS et.al. take note, when you're releasing a new OS version that you tell me my Surface Pro, made by yourselves and at a premium price too) won't even run.

[DR]

Golly I remember so many times I had to download stuff on dial-up.

When HEXUS was started ADSL didn't even exist and ISDN was a luxury(!)

Let's not even go near Null Modem cables

[Saracen999]

I still have a couple of those somewhere if you want one, David.

For that matter, I still have a couple of the higher end US Robotics Courier modems. I used to run a (Wildcat) BBS on them with a couple of phone lines. Damn things were nearly a grand a piece.

[Terbinator]

I remember years ago, late 90s, using something called the X-Network (along those lines at least) where you had to queue up and use the service but you were only charged 1p for an hours usage as long as you disconnected before the hour mark. Did anyone else use this?

Back then I thought the internet could only be used for game cheats (hotcheats.com, supercheats.com and cheatcodecentral are the names I remember) and downloading other people's tracks on Rollercoaster Tycoon

[Jonj1611]

I remember when you signed up for an internet service you could send up to 500 emails a month, but if you spent more you could send more!

14.4K was my first modem

[neepheid]

Yup, I also had a USR Courier. Best modem ever, bulletproof reliability. My first tech job was support for a local ISP when dialup was all the rage and we had a huge bank of Couriers handling the incoming connections. That was a great first job. While most people were struggling with dialup, I was on the end of a big fat pipe to the internet which I may or may not have used to download PSX games which I may or may not have taken home in chunks on a stack of 7 100MB Zip discs and reconstituted with my 4x burner Only 20 mins to burn a CD, in your face, 2x burners!

[Ttaskmaster]

I look forward to the days when I complain about the data transfer time between Earth and Jupiter, only for GigaGalaxy to come install proper LightspeedBand™ in my home and once again make me the envy of all my gaming friends!

[ik9000]

I remember the days before the internet. We had to use (shudders) faxes. I also remember the old ribbon printers. and Acorn/BBC/Spectrum ZX etc. And does anyone remember true floppy discs, that really were floppy? Massive things those were. Then the 3" (yes 3") double-sided discs with a whole 176k each side! crazy times. You could at least put one of those in a rucksack and still have a reasonable chance of being able to use it after a bus journey. And so much quicker than waiting 3 hours to load a cassette tape only to get read error a/b on the final line of the splash screen before the game start. Luckily I never had to deal with the old punchcards, nor the code reels of the really early computers. And the only glass valves I've dealt with have been in guitar amps where they still trundle on. Tech will always progress, and thank heavens it does. We just need to get better at recycling obsolete kit to reduce the waste and environmental footprint.

[badass]

I look forward to the days when I complain about the data transfer time between Earth and Jupiter, only for GigaGalaxy to come install proper LightspeedBand™ in my home and once again make me the envy of all my gaming friends!

I'm afraid those days will never happen. No amount of technology can overcome the laws of nature.* The best case ping - when Earth and Jupiter are at their closest, the ping time will be approximately 64 light minutes away :-S

However I'm sure GigaGalaxy will ensure you have many Gigabits of bandwidth!



* No amount of wishful thinking - even by scientists that should really know better can make anything go beyond light speed. Otherwise also sometimes referred to as the speed of causality.

[Jonj1611]

I remember the days before the internet. We had to use (shudders) faxes. I also remember the old ribbon printers. and Acorn/BBC/Spectrum ZX etc. And does anyone remember true floppy discs, that really were floppy? Massive things those were. Then the 3" (yes 3") double-sided discs with a whole 176k each side! crazy times. You could at least put one of those in a rucksack and still have a reasonable chance of being able to use it after a bus journey. And so much quicker than waiting 3 hours to load a cassette tape only to get read error a/b on the final line of the splash screen before the game start. Luckily I never had to deal with the old punchcards, nor the code reels of the really early computers. And the only glass valves I've dealt with have been in guitar amps where they still trundle on. Tech will always progress, and thank heavens it does. We just need to get better at recycling obsolete kit to reduce the waste and environmental footprint.

I do indeed, my first PC had a 5 and a quarter inch drive and 3 and a half. My first printer was an Epson LX-80

[[GSV]Trig]

Beige modems were the best!

Pre-internet, dialing up to the local BBS and grabbing files with no idea what you were actually going to get as it was all text based.

Then we had bonded ISDN put in at the college I worked at, single machine on the internet in a separate room from the main classroom, free AOL account, probably back in 98 or so...

[Saracen999]

I remember the days before the internet. We had to use (shudders) faxes. I also remember the old ribbon printers. and Acorn/BBC/Spectrum ZX etc. And does anyone remember true floppy discs, that really were floppy? Massive things those were. Then the 3" (yes 3") double-sided discs with a whole 176k each side! crazy times. You could at least put one of those in a rucksack and still have a reasonable chance of being able to use it after a bus journey. And so much quicker than waiting 3 hours to load a cassette tape only to get read error a/b on the final line of the splash screen before the game start. Luckily I never had to deal with the old punchcards, nor the code reels of the really early computers. And the only glass valves I've dealt with have been in guitar amps where they still trundle on. Tech will always progress, and thank heavens it does. We just need to get better at recycling obsolete kit to reduce the waste and environmental footprint.

Oh, yeah. Valves? I still have a dozen or so wrapped in cloth, stored in the garage. Not that they're probably the right ones to be any use these days.

But if you want the really fancy-pants high-priced hifi amps these days, a surprising proportion of them are still valve. One of the reasons being, IIRC, that they perform pretty linearly right across the amplification range from quiet to very loud, whereas nearly all traditional transistor amps had two or more and signals could get it bit messy at the overlap points. I also still have an old Yamaha amp that was switchable between what was 'normal' (Class B) and the 'Class A' setting that supposedly mimic'd that valve function and ONLY used the one power transistor. Whether it really did or not I never knew but it restricted power from something like 70w to about 20w if yu turned it on, and it then ran damned hot, so I didn't very often use it.

Matrix printers? Yup. Was always a fan of Panasonic, like the (IIRC) KXP-1124 (A4 width) and KXP-1524 (wide carriage). I even had a 'daisywheel' printer. Dot matrix printers were great for many things, and they got better towards the end (before being killed off by inkjets and then, cheaper lasers) but initially, matrix printers, even very good ones like those Panasonics, just weren't 'correspondence' quality, hence daisywheel. It was essentially a sort-of automated version of a golfball-type typewriter, complete with fabric ribbon. The-inking those was fun .... not.

And modems .... I started out with 1200 baud, upgraded to 2400 (max) in the redoubtable Dowty Quattro, then on to the US Robotics 14.4 Couriers, then the 28.8 Couriers, and finally the 56k Couriers. By 'eck did I spend some money on modems.

Finally, faxes. About a week ago, in sorting stuff out in the loft, I came across my old Amstrad fax/printer/phone/answering machine. And I still have probably 20 or 30 rolls of thermal paper for it. It's sitting in my spare bedroom while I get around to thinking of a better home for it than the council recycling centre. As far as I know, it still works perfectly. It certainly did when it went into the loft .... so if any museum, or anybody else, wants it, let me know. Just don't wait too long.

But yeah, I remember fax machines all right.

[Ttaskmaster]

* No amount of wishful thinking - even by scientists that should really know better can make anything go beyond light speed. Otherwise also sometimes referred to as the speed of causality.

I thought this whole thing about quantum tunneling had proven that it was, if only theoretically, possible to break lightspeed... or at least shortcut it?
I don't understand most of this, but... https://www.quantamagazine.org/quant...ight-20201020/

So even if it's not actual lightspeed or greater, it can still be Lightspeed™ for marketing purposes, in the same way "Gigabit" internet is only 900Mbps.
But then, if I'm flying my spaceship out somewhere near Jupiter and flapping over comms with Earth, it either means my dream future has arrived, or that Star Citizen/Sqn42 has finally been released!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I remember the days before the internet. We had to use (shudders) faxes. I also remember the old ribbon printers. and Acorn/BBC/Spectrum ZX etc. And does anyone remember true floppy discs, that really were floppy? Massive things those were. Then the 3" (yes 3") double-sided discs with a whole 176k each side! crazy times. You could at least put one of those in a rucksack and still have a reasonable chance of being able to use it after a bus journey. And so much quicker than waiting 3 hours to load a cassette tape only to get read error a/b on the final line of the splash screen before the game start. Luckily I never had to deal with the old punchcards, nor the code reels of the really early computers. And the only glass valves I've dealt with have been in guitar amps where they still trundle on. Tech will always progress, and thank heavens it does. We just need to get better at recycling obsolete kit to reduce the waste and environmental footprint.

Winchester hard drives! They were huge!

[TeePee]

I wonder what would have happened if you had requested it on CD. Is their customer service that good, that they would actually send you one, all these years later?

[g8ina]

I remember working for GEC Computers out of their Brum office late 80s, using a telephone handset thingy, an acoustic coupler (IIRC), do call a dialup BBS 14k ??

And earlier, 1980 working for Plessey Poole on traffic light systems. I was in QA dept. They also made the worlds fastest modem (at the time). 16k !! Four one foot square multi layered PCBs stacked one on top of the other like a layer cake !


Good grief, how far we have come.