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modem speed

Depends on the wires. Noisy lines make for slow connections.

Also keep in mind that unless you are going to a modem at a 'central office' owned by an ISP, the best you are going to get is 33.6. ie, if you connect to AOL or another big ISP you might get up to a 53.x connection, but if you are connecting to another home user's PC the maximum speed is 33.6. That is because the 56.6K modems are asymetrical .. download speeds can be faster than upload speeds. Getting that faster download speed requires special equipment at the telco central office.

My first modem was 1200 .. you always got a 1200 bps connection on the old Hayes. You just might not like the results. :) Back then (1984) they didn't do error checking in the modem hardware .. what came through came through, garbage or not.
 
Well, I remember the rush when I connected at 9600 for the very first time with my new (to me) USRobotics Courier HST. I bought it used, but it was still the fastest thing going at the time. Of course, the BBS's that I called had to have the same modem for that 9600 connect, but at the time USR was giving a substantial discount to sysops of BBS's. No doubt because it would encourage users of said BBS to buy USR.

Kent
 
Funniest thing ever, I booted aol 3.0 on a 300 baud modem, took over an hour to load a web page, my friends and I were having a fun time, the modem went bad though, shame, would have been a nice museum piece.
 
Slowest I ever connected was using the internal 2400 baud on a Zenith SuperSport 286 laptop with CGA using NetTamer on mFire. Took it 15 minutes to load YAHOO!

I had a 14.4 in an IBM PS/VAluepoint with 8MB of RAM running Windows 3.1 and MSIE 3.03, not half bad actually, though I could NEVER stand that slow a speed now having DSL and all.

I got into it late, my first Modem was a US Robotics Sportster 56K external, cramming bits through an 8250 UART on my old hacked together 486 which I assembled with hardly a clue of what I was doing, running DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 with AOL 3.0 AND 4.0 because one would display some pages, and the other one would display others, all the while I had to live with 16 color graphics. This was 2001.
 
Mad-Mike said:
Slowest I ever connected was using the internal 2400 baud on a Zenith SuperSport 286 laptop with CGA using NetTamer on mFire. Took it 15 minutes to load YAHOO!

I had a 14.4 in an IBM PS/VAluepoint with 8MB of RAM running Windows 3.1 and MSIE 3.03, not half bad actually, though I could NEVER stand that slow a speed now having DSL and all.

I got into it late, my first Modem was a US Robotics Sportster 56K external, cramming bits through an 8250 UART on my old hacked together 486 which I assembled with hardly a clue of what I was doing, running DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 with AOL 3.0 AND 4.0 because one would display some pages, and the other one would display others, all the while I had to live with 16 color graphics. This was 2001.
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lol, I know how you feel, I didn't get into computers until 2000. It was a Zenith 386 33MHz, with 4MB RAM, and in 2001 I upgraded to a Zenith 486 100MHz, and later that year, I saved and got a celeron 667MHz HP..lol...after that bad experience, I started building all mine. Now I use a p4 3ghz@3.45ghz, with 2GB ram..lol, I still liked my old zeniths better.
 
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