I remember this from the school library computers. That and even back then the school had some kind of broadband, it blew my mind that to get online all we had to do was open IE. I was used to that part but always had whatever dial up service we had at the time to open up and connect first. Just clicking IE and going was crazy to me.
I remember before I had the internet wondering why companies had ads for "http://" and others were on "www" and having no clue if I needed to buy a special internet to access each.
I still laugh thinking back to 8th grade when my buddy, Tyler, got his first pair of JNCOs. To paint a picture, Tyler couldn't have been more than 90 pounds soaking wet and had a bowl cut (being it the 90s). He had a big goofy grin on his face and goes "check it out - I can fit a whole 2 liter of Mountain Dew in my pocket!" And sure enough, he pulled a full 2 liter of Mountain Dew out of his front pocket.
I don't remember kilobaud being a word. I only remember it being a word that was misused for some reason. Or maybe just disfavored against an actual unit. Like it was equivalent to like some small unit, and got outgrown quickly.
Like when going from bits per second to kilobits per second, I think hair was a single word that meant bits per second, but was not a literal unit, so kilobaud didn't make sense, whereas kilobits did.
At least that's how I remember it off hand, could be wrong.
Baud rate is the maximum number of transitions per second of the state of a transmission medium. Hz is the actual number of cycles per second, so it varies degending on the data transmitted. Bitrate is the number of bits transmitted per second.
Usually bits are transmitted in groups with some redundancy to allow errors to be corrected. E.g. early Ethernet used 8b/10b encoding; 8 bits of data were transmitted as a 10 bit "symbol".
With a 1b/1b encoding baud rate would equal bit rate, but in practice that was essentially never used so the numbers woud diverge. Bitrate is more meaningful to the user.
SI and binary prefixes can be applied to baud, so kilobaud is certainly a word.
It may have been misused at some point, but "baud" was a word long before the internet, and I distinctly remember my modem at the time using the word baud on the box. I was just a teenager, so I'm sure I was missing key information. It was used, tho.
Here, this is proving us both right:
If your modem-to-modem connection is at 14400 bps, it's going to be sending 6 bits per signal transition (or symbol) at 2400 baud. A speed of 28800 bps is obtained by 3200 baud at 9 bits/baud. When people misuse the word baud, they may mean the modem speed (such as 33.6k).
Kilobaud is definitely a word that means a thing. Baud is a literal unit of measure that uses the metric prefixes.
The bundle of myst games was on humble bundle a week or two ago. I've been waiting for the right time to immerse myself in myst VR and be just as confounded as I was as a kid. Then I get to see if Riven is still completely impossible for me.
I loved my discman, but remember trying to pretend like it wasn't skipping with every bodily movement? That's the advantage the walkman had that we didn't want to admit at the time
Felt like they were only really big in Japan and the U.K. though. I thought it was such a cool technology, but couldn’t even find one to buy where I grew up.
Like the translucent (still corded, so not that hi-tech) phone with the bright colors for all the components? I had one of those! I think the outer part of my cord was actually clear, too.
Ooh, and that dope clear pager was hella rad!
On that note, remember payphones?? (getting paged by my mom and having to find a payphone to call the family 800# and check in...)
Wait, family 800 #? I don't remember that. We skipped pagers though, so I remember them being a thing, but I only saw them on TV, don't think I ever saw one in person besides on doctors at a hospital.
I still have one of those in clear blue, along with clear blue extender cords. Have clear purple GameCube controllers, and a light-up clear Xbox controller 😁
Now controllers are so heavy I have to skin them to help with hand fatigue, so no point getting clear cases.
I miss that aesthetic, though, and I’m glad it’s starting to reappear.
80's, early 90's. I think from '92 or so onwards, CD-ROM drives became standard equipment for home computers, but until the late 90's they still came equipped with a floppy drive, if only to boot into recovery mode after a crash.
Mostly 80s and early 90s (I think the nodelist peaked in size in about 1991 or 1992 or thereabouts, at about 30,000 nodes - I could be wrong). It's still going by the way.
I remember the info campaign of my country's change of currency when it got pegged to the Deutschmark after it did a Venezimbabwe. It was by a popular children's/teen tv show host.
I was about 2 or 3 but the only thing I remember is the news anchors repeating the word "Chechen" all the time. I understood nothing but it sounded funny.
We had a stereo with an inbuilt vinyl record player, as well as cassette tape player.
I played NES games on Terminator-2. Post-soviet collapse flooded the market with knockoffs which were decent for the price.
I remember watching Bill Clinton's scandal on the news though I had little idea what happened, nor what impeachment meant.
You'll need to do something that doesn't come up in the social zeitgeist that often, but is instantly recognizable to anyone from that era.
Maybe talk about how a lot of the time people's watches said different times and you didn't know which ones were right?
Alternatively you can share some personal anecdote that relates to well known trends at the time. Like talk about listening to smells like teen spirit while smoking cigarettes stolen from your friend's older brother.