skirtcafe.org

Thank you for that very complete and coherent answer. I'll change my saved connection.

All of that makes sense Carl. I'm quite sure I have neither the latest or greatest in tech, but it works, except for the GPS on my phone, I keep meaning to go to the Apple store and have them fix that.

Similar to your suspicions about government, I'm quite sure the fix they will suggest is that I get a new phone! If so, I'll transfer all of my photos to my laptop and get an Android-based phone. But I digress.

I just wonder if ANYONE on our forum uses a dial-up connection. Perhaps a survey asking that question is in order. If anyone does, I would suggest you maintain course and speed. If no one uses a dial-up connection, I feel we could safely step up from that level to the lowest level currently being used by anyone.

While I am not using dial up What I have is the next step up and it is a small step. The biggest problem is with the computer itself. It uses win 2000 and has a very slow clock. All of the programs being used on it are up to date as ear as the last version that works with win 2000. I also have many old DOS programs that do not have a windoze comparable substitute.

I'm glad Carl keeps the forum a lean machine. The start up is fast and navigating is also swift.

Many years ago I met an older American guy at a camp site in the South of France. Early in the morning he was hacking away at a laptop when laptops were still a novelty. I asked about his laptop and we started a conversation. He told me he had worked at the development of the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. He was more or less fuming of the young programmers in the current period with large memories in fast computers. They don't know how to program, he said. Nobody cares about a few Mbyte more or less of program size. When he was in the team developing Lotus, they had to fight for every byte in the program. They spent days to nibble at the program size because the memory space was limited and the computers of small companies were quite slow. Also user friendlyness was a huge point of discussion. They hired a behavioral psychologist for advise and that guy did a good job as far as I can remember. My previous experience with a spreadsheet was something that was running on CP/M.

beachlion wrote: ↑Wed Jun 17, 2020 7:25 pm He told me he had worked at the development of the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. ...

I'm still using one of its successors almost every single day: Claris Works 4.0  It takes up very little disk space, is quick to load and can do all sorts of amazing things once you have learned to use it properly.

Tables
Graphs
Building estimations
Complex electronics calculations
Customer database
Encoding/decoding text
Generating passwords

I'd be lost without it.

crfriend wrote: ↑Tue Jun 16, 2020 10:40 pm ... I set things up so that the forum can actually be used over a dial-up link.

I have been very glad of that policy in the past.  On occasions I have had to get access to the forum with a Mac G3 running OS8.6 -- it was slow, but at least it worked.  It ain't broke, so please don't fix it.

Thanks, Pelmut.

To the detractors, I rest my case.

I remember writing character transfer routines written in bytes. Yes, bytes not kbytes. Quite fast too but the limitation was one character at a time, but what we were transferring were not enormous blocks of text. Those were the days when kermit ruled the roost. And no, not the frog.

Kernit! There's a name I haven't heard in a long time when used related to computers. I was quite possibly one of the last guys who kept that capable of being used with the CLIX operating system from the 1980s (and boy it felt it!).

The last time I used kermit was, I think, 1990. By that time Windows 286 was out [0] and the writing was on the wall.

[0] the first version of Windwoes that I used. I thought it great at first, not sure whether I liked it over the MacOs, then I started to find the faults. Forgave them at first since it was a new OS. But when the same faults kept cropping up my liking faded. I preferred UNIX and VMS.

The only Kermit I know is a green cheeky chappy who is in awe of a porcine blonde.

Ah, well, Steve, you had to be a techie to use kermit and transmitting data from one computer to another could be a bit of a black art at that point in time. What happens today seems so, so, trivial. But AFAIK there are two tasks that still don't seem to be possible and Carl, or one or another of you may put me right on this. Firstly, you can't just directly connect to laptops or desktops with a cable and transfer data between them. Secondly, you can't type a character on a laptop keyboard and it immediately be printed on a printer. In other words, make the laptop appear as a typewriter.

Sinned wrote: ↑Sun Jun 21, 2020 10:46 amBut AFAIK there are two tasks that still don't seem to be possible and Carl, or one or another of you may put me right on this. Firstly, you can't just directly connect to laptops or desktops with a cable and transfer data between them. Secondly, you can't type a character on a laptop keyboard and it immediately be printed on a printer. In other words, make the laptop appear as a typewriter.

Both are possible in theory, but require know-how and so aren't operations for the general punter.

Connecting two laptops with modern Ethernet connections is pretty trivial now given that special crossover cables aren't needed, but one needs to know how to configure the Ethernet ports and bodge in all the network settings. Even in the days of serial connections -- and this is where Kermit came in -- it wasn't trivial and required special "null-modem" cables and knowledge of setting up the speed/bits/parity settings on the serial ports.

The second is vastly more difficult and requires the use of a custom-written program and a printer that is capable to printing one character at a time that isn't line-buffered. I do not believe printers like that have been made since the early 1980s. So, on the second, unless you're a real specialist with historic kit Dennis is right, it's not possible.

Wow, Carl, that brings back memories. Cross over and null modem cables. Now they're memories! To be honest all that knowledge that I possessed has gone. So, in summary the first is possible but difficult and in the days of modern communications probably not worth the effort except perhaps as a theoretical exercise to prove it. And the second is impossible and it's something that I always thought so. Well, there you go. Thank you.

Actually, the first is merely a nuisance unless you understand networking. The second is actually possible but it'll be difficult to find the correct printing device that can print one character at a time. LASER printers cannot do it as they're page-at-a-time raster-painting devices, daisy-wheel printers can do it as that's how they fundamentally work -- but they are also functionally obsolete, some dot-matrix printers can do it (e.g. DECwriter-style terminals), and your old-school teleprinters (e.g. the once-ubiquitous Teletype ASR-33) do it, but all of those are long obsolete.

I still have my STAR NX1000, 9-pin, Dot-matrix printer. It works
if I have the correct connections on the back of the PC. I was able
to find a box of ribbons for it. All is packed away - - somewhere......

Uncle Al