Re: Terminal Emulation rates

[Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com>]

"Sean Fahey" <a2fan@hotmail.com> writes:
> No, in 1980 - 300bps was pretty much the standard. Anything higher was
> usually corporate, mega-expensive and (often) proprietary. I remember using
> 45/110bps modems - and using a 300bps modem with a proprietary 450bps "fast"

I'm not disagreeing with what you wrote, but in 1980-1982 a lot of the
people I knew had the Novation AppleCat modem.  It would do the usual
110 and 300 bps (Bell 103) in full duplex, but could also support
the asymmetric 1200 bps/75 bps Bell 202 standard.  I don't remember any
BBSes supporting that, but I routinely used it when transferring files
to friends.  It worked great for Xmodem file transfers since the majority
of the traffic was in one direction with only the low-bandwidth ACKs
going in the reverse direction.

The AppleCat was designed to accomodate an optional 1200 bps full duplex
(Bell 212) daughtercard, but they were introduced later and were fairly
pricy.  The Bell 212 standard became the dominant 1200 bps dialup
standard in the U.S., while most of the world used V.22.  The 1200 bps
smartmodems hit commodity status and sub-$100 prices in 1985, about the
time that 2400 bps modems (V.22bis, such as the Courrier 2400) hit the
market (around $600).