I guess you never had a cable modem die on you and had to wait days for repair and be without the internet?
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What is the most useless vintage computing item?
- Thread starter generic486
- Start date
I guess you never had a cable modem die on you and had to wait days for repair and be without the internet?
Chuck(G)
25k Member
What's "cable"? I do have DSL and keep a spare modem around just in case--as well as some POTS modems, just in case.
On Thursday, I saw a guy not with CenturyLink looking into the temple of boxes out on the roadside. I asked him if I could help him find something. Turns out that he's from a contractor and they're scoping out adding fiber from the CO to the temple. I asked him if that would also involve an upgrade to the DSLAM and he said, yes, probably. Hey, I may get out of 1Mb/sec hell yet...
What's "cable"? I do have DSL and keep a spare modem around just in case--as well as some POTS modems, just in case.
On Thursday, I saw a guy not with CenturyLink looking into the temple of boxes out on the roadside. I asked him if I could help him find something. Turns out that he's from a contractor and they're scoping out adding fiber from the CO to the temple. I asked him if that would also involve an upgrade to the DSLAM and he said, yes, probably. Hey, I may get out of 1Mb/sec hell yet...
Forget what I am paying for exactly but today I get 20Mb down and 1Mb up from multiple sites using speedtest. If you ever had a model screw up for a few days (or worse have power out in your city) you find out just how much you use and rely on the internet for things these days. 1Mb would suck for me because I love streaming Netflix HD to my TV (on an Alias kick lately, and some old SD X-Files too) and you need something like 3Mb for that to work. Windows updates are also pretty fast these days considering how much data you are getting.
patscc
Veteran Member
Boy, must be nice living in civilization. What's y'all's uplink transfer speed ?
patscc
patscc
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Me? 768Kb/sec best case.
patscc
Veteran Member
That's pretty good. I get half of that on a good day. Maybe I'll bite the bullet and ditch DSL for cable.
patscc
patscc
Ole Juul
Veteran Member
I just read that only only 2.6% of land is urbanized in the USA. One could then reasonably assume that 90% of US (probably same in Canada) does not have DSL which requires one to be close to an exchange or similar expensive installation which is not economically viable outside of an urban setting. Cable is the same - generally not economically viable except in highly concentrated centres. This explains why dialup is still very popular in North America and probably will be from some time to come.
Speed? According to on-line speed testing, I get 1.5Mb/sec (0.18MB/sec for those that like bytes) both up and down. That's what my connection is advertised as, so I can't complain in that regard. Sometimes I even get a little bit more in both directions. However, all ISPs do serious QOS filtering and the end user will never be able to know what they're actually buying. Lately I've been monitoring my bandwith in real time with my gateway router and I never get anything close to what speed tests show. Those lie, because they don't show sustained speeds. It also depends on what port you are using. Typically port 80 and 443 are allowed full bandwith for the first few kilobytes and then it is throttled down like the rest of it. That gives the sensation of a snappy performance, but it's just an effect which allows them to keep costumers happy - and fooled.
After giving this one some thought, I've finally figured out what has become truly useless (at least in my world) of vintage computing.... Double sided high density 5 1/4" floppies. I have absolutely no use for them. If the computer is new enough to have 1.2M floppies, why not use the 3.5" 1.4M floppies? Besides, if I REALLY wanted a 1.2M 5 1/4" floppy, I'd just format a double sided double density one. I have tons of those, and I need every single one of them since they work in my Commodore and Apple drives.
patscc
Veteran Member
Not every computer out there has the luxury of having a 3.5 drive bay, and putting in one with rails and a filler plate may be a bit of an aesthetic turn-off.
Besides, they make for wonderful head-protectors during shipping. Or so I'd imagine, I'm not really a big seller of systems, or anything else for that matter.
patscc
Besides, they make for wonderful head-protectors during shipping. Or so I'd imagine, I'm not really a big seller of systems, or anything else for that matter.
patscc
patscc
Veteran Member
I'm not sure if this really qualifies on this thread, but just what is the purpose of the auto-repeat function on keyboards ? That'd bbbbbbbbbbbbbeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee my nominatioon.
patscc
patscc
Ole Juul
Veteran Member
For people like myself who prefer to not use a mouse, it allows us to use the cursor keys to move around. In DOS I use an accelerator with user definable delay and speed. That means that I can have the cursor move slowly at first, then move very fast after a pre-set period (say 0.2 seconds). When I take my finger off the key, it stops right away. I don't know what particular utility other people use, but DOS is almost unusable without one if you want to work at human type speeds. The utility I use is called "cruise control" and I've been using it as long as I've used DOS. At 16K it's a bit on the large side, but it has other functions, such as date or time insertion. If you're a DOS user you absolutely need something like this or you will be waiting for the cursor to move from place to place and that will drive you bats**t crazy! That almost happened to me once.
generic486
Experienced Member
Once. I have 3 of the exact same routers at my house, Motorola SBG 900, none of them have ever died. I did have a Netgear bigpond branded router that was stubborn. It would choose to work sometimes and not others.
Tor
Veteran Member
Approximately 500kb/s, that's the most I could get on my brand new ADSL installation, with the distance to the nearest whatever-it-is-they-need. And that's only 3km I think. I'm not impressed. Download is better and good enough, but upload is too slow for storing backups into my cloud service. So today I'm in at work to get the job done in time (just a backup of my Android tablet before I succumb to the enforced Jelly Bean upgrade).
-Tor
Stone
10k Member
Have you actually done that? What program did you use? I didn't think it was possible. I'm curious even though I'd never do it since I have hundreds of new 1.2M disks.
patscc
Veteran Member
I think you can actually do it with just plain DOS's format command, and manually specifying parameters. I seem to remember that you get a boatload of errors, you don't always get past track 0, and if you do get one formatted, it has a ton of bad sectors. I've actually done it, way back when, and decided it wasn't worth it. I seem to remember there was a rumor floating around that 360k disks were really 1.2 ones that didn't make it through Q/A. This was before I knew about oerstedts and flux desnsity and so on, or I would have never tried it.
Ole Juul said
patscc
Ole Juul said
Right, who doesn't, but do we really need auto-repeat on all the other keys ? How often do you find yourself needing a string of ^ ?
patscc
Windows will let you format it either for 360k or 1.2M. When I was using 286 computers in high school, I decided against buying a 3.5" floppy since I didn't have any computers that used them at home. Instead, I just used a 2S 2D floppy, formatted it at school to 1.2M, and used it for the entire year without any errors.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Try formatting one to 360K, then try formatting the same one to 1.2M. It likely won't work. I've seen degaussed 1.2M disks formatted to 360K as well. It's very dangerous to do as the magnetic characteristics of the two are very different.
Ole Juul
Veteran Member
I just tried that with a clean formatted DSDD and it gave errors. However, the disk worked - but not well. Checkdisk was OK, but scandisk gave unspecified errors. Copying files to the disk was successful, but I couldn't get past more than about 600K worth before it complained. I suppose some formulations and/or drives could be more suitable to this than others. To finish my little experiment, I demagnetised the disk completely and reformatted it in a 360K drive again. It was fine and passed scandisk.
From an engineering and data point of view, this is obviously a bad idea. I'm guessing though, that some software will display less complaints. That doesn't mean all is well.
Ole Juul
Veteran Member
You're right. One doesn't often need repeat on many of the letters. I do however often draw lines like:
Code:
-----------------------------------------------I wouldn't want to do that one character at time. I wouldn't even want to do it with the default repeat rate.
To me, I would want repeat on ~`^_-+=:'<>.* and wouldn't likely need it on the other "letters". Except most of the other half of the IBM 437 character set which has all the cool line draw and shading characters. So .... should we disable auto repeat on half the characters because it's wasting resources? lolThe "repeat" that gets me is the "double click" used in some notorious GUIs - usually the ones that run really slowly. I click once. Nothing happens. Then I realize that it probably wants a double click. So I double click. Then three instances finally open up. Sheesh!
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Would an ISA SASI (not SCSI) adapter fall into the "useless" category?