5 Sep
2020
5 Sep
'20
10:58 p.m.
Hi Paul,
The whole of New Zealand was originally connected to Arpanet at 9600 bps via the
University of Waikato in the 80's when our work email was updated twice daily using
UUCP.
At that time "high speed" local computing access was a 3274 controller connected
via 2400 bps leased line to a local computer centre and we booked access to the four
shared terminal in hourly blocks.
You can imagine how we all felt when the luxury of a shiny new 780 arrived with terminals
for everyone that wanted one.
John
On 6/09/2020, at 08:45, Paul Koning <paulkoning at
comcast.net> wrote:
?
On Sep 5, 2020, at 4:13 PM, John Yaldwyn <jy
at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
Hi Mike,
I live in a rural area here in New Zealand.
The best internet on offer is 5Mbps/500kbps ADSL, slow satellite with horrendous latency,
or rural broadband on 700 MHz LTE.
That's not so bad.
I remember when DEC's internal "Engineering Net" first extended to the UK
(Reading, near London). I'm pretty sure it wasn't what was then called a
"high speed link" so most likely that was a 2400 baud link. High speed, for us,
meant 9600 baud.
Yes, a few organizations with big budgets, like ARPAnet, had a super fast backbone -- 56
kbps.
I remember how boggled my mind was when Ethernet first appeared, with 10 Mbps wires and
network interface cards capable of running at a fair fraction of that speed. DEUNA
couldn't do wire rate, I'm pretty sure, but it came respectably close. QNA was
even faster, when it worked.
paul