When I was in college at OSU we ran a 12 node ringdown BBS with all USR 16.8 modems. We used node PC's connected by netware 3.1. Each PC ran two USR 16.8 modems online simultaneously and we had 6 node machines on the network. We ran a proprietary underground BBS software called celerity. Most days our 12 telephone line where tied up and we had people calling our BBS from all over the world. Our project was stuff funded by our members who would donate $ and hardware to our project. It was a lot of fun. It's funny when we had the phone company come to the house we were living in. They mounted a box on the brick wall outside the second story window that could contain up to 128 phone lines to host our 12 phone line ringdown.
US Robotics were the Kings of modems... Every BBS like ours ran USR 16.8 because while everyone else had 14.4k or slower modems we could all talk 16.8k... the good ol' days for sure! Bill Bill On Fri, May 31, 2019, 8:50 PM Terry Kennedy <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 11:02:10 PM UTC-4, charles wrote: >> >> I was always sad about Gandalf, they kinda Zigged when everyone else >> zagged. Way Back when I recall showing one of their engineers one of >> the First HAYES modems -and I asked why Gandalf was not in the market. >> He answered that PCs were Kids stuff, and that they only made products >> for data centers. >> > > To be fair, that wasn't just Gandalf - that was the mind-set of most of > the industry. In the product space that Gandalf occupied there were also > companies like Case and DCA, neither of whom were able to successfully > transition to the new market. DCA did a quick save by purchasing the IRMA > company, who made 3270 adapters for PCs (and later Macs and also standalone > units). So they had a new market, pretty much all to themselves, while > continuing to have sales / support income from legacy customers. > > On the other hand, those established companies were selling their products > at much higher prices (the 4-port terminal-side board for the PACX IV was > $600, and most of that was profit) and they also had partnerships with > established modem vendors like ComData and perhaps didn't want to disrupt > those deals in order to get into a very price-sensitive market of unknown > (at the time) size. > > There wasn't a lot of movement in the other direction - of the early > low-end modem makers, US Robotics was probably the only one to get any sort > of sizable penetration of the host-side market. Part of this was a complete > lack of understanding about how sales were made on the host side - I don't > think any of the low-end modem makers offered reasonable quantity discounts > to end users, none offered lease / financing options, and all of them > wanted MORE for a rackmount unit (which was a bare board - no case, manual, > software, power adapter, cables, etc.) than they wanted for a standalone > unit, and of course they also wanted big $ for the rackmount chassis. The > sole example was Microcom, who graciously sold their rackmount modems for > the same price as the standalone models. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the > Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. > To unsubscribe from this topic, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/topic/neonixie-l/PC8pHxmTWSg/unsubscribe. > To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to > [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/572e0080-957a-4d95-a028-2b72028eedf7%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/572e0080-957a-4d95-a028-2b72028eedf7%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/CADToqn29WAQh%2BVEdAjWnY%3D3hvEHsz6qi%2BDuKjZ0-77skB4PFNA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
