Dumbed down consumer electronics: Adding DTV channels

the

entire

(non-free)

other GSM

there.

radios

CAUTION, I just got an E-mail announcement:

"Dear X-TIC User,

Our approach is to continually improve our processes to meet and exceed our customers expectations. Nevertheless we need to inform you today about an issue that occurred with the matching of the XH035, XA035 and XO035 MIM capacitors cmm, cdmm. The re-characterization of the XH035, XA035 and XO035 processes showed lower than expected performance. Please read the attached PDF document for more details.

The XH035 Cadence PDK will be updated in accordance to the changed parameters.

X-FAB has started immediate internal actions to find out the root cause for this behavior. An update of that issue is expected to be available by the end of January 2011." ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |

                   Spice is like a sports car... 
     Performance only as good as the person behind the wheel.

Wow, I vaguely remember those...

I also remember that the general consensus was that C-120's were a little risky -- car cassette players were known to eat them!

I'd been told as a kid that C-180's existed, although I've never seen one except on the Internet:

. Wikipedia claims there was even a C-240.

Ha... check this out -- a headset-style micro-cassette player:

... funky!

---Joel

the

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other GSM

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radios

?$200...

and

I know :-)

Personally I find it very comforting if a company is upfront, fesses up to mishaps and then takes corrective action. This process is cutting edge stuff.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Quite simple really, they would not deal with physical media. DL it or go without.

Well, at $100 which was a lot of money back then I am sure you could have found someone who'd download it for you via a local call, then send you the tape. You pay him $50 and keep the other $50. Win-win :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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use

I saw a lot of those that were garbage. Most of those sold in the US were just overpriced Japanese junk. with a fancy, no known brand label. The data tapes used a different backing material that would break, instead of stretching.

Once I saw Sutro Tower after take-off at SFO, sticking out of a nice fluffy cloud layer. You could only see the top and the antennas in full sunshine, nothing else. Absolutely picturesque and I had my camera stashed in the overhead. Could still bite myself for that, I never saw this again on any eastbound flight.

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Regards, Joerg

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This was not even in the early WWW days. There barely was Usenet. I almost could fly there and back cheaper. But i had _NO_ means to _find_a_local_ for the described advantage. The infrastructure just was NOT there.

At what baud rate? This doesn't make any sense. CIS was offering file sharing between users from the early 80's at about $10/hour. And almost every hardware vendor worth their salt had a forum on Compuserve with all their various support files available online for download.

2400baud = 15kB/min = 67mins 9600baud = 1kb/sec = 8 mins 14k4 modems with a relatively cheap chipset were available in 1991 before WWW. By 1994 I had a Boca 28k8 V34 - the last of my modems to come in a nice solid extruded aluminium case with a price to match.

Strange companies you dealt with. Mailing floppies was commonplace in that era to supply software. I still have stuff on 8", 5.25" and 3.5".

Compuserve probably would have done it with a local call for $10/hour and FIDOnet almost for free.

Regards, Martin Brown

The baud rate was specified as 2400 baud on the line above.

Those may be raw through put numbers, but with simple half duplex protocols such as Xmodem, each packet is acknowledged, before the next packet is sent. Due to line turn around delays, this will significantly reduce the effective throughput.

In those days the lower level telephone network was analog and connections suffered from crosstalks from other lines, e.g. pulses for the billing system and dialing pulses etc.

With a bad noisy line, the data frames were frequently corrupted, requiring a retransmission, usually after a timeout, so the effective throughput was way below what you would get from a raw connection at that line speed.

One BBS network on Iceland used a sneakernet. An Icelandic person flew each week to work in England, carrying with him all messages going abroad on floppies and when returning back on Friday, he carried all messages directed to Iceland on floppies.

That's not the sneaker-net. That used to be the kerosene-net :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

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You could not find a hungry student at Clarkson who wouldn't sneeze at making $50 in an hour or two? I find that a bit hard to believe.

I had a fairly high-tech side job at my university starting around 1980 and that paid $5. I'd have jumped at that oppotunity.

--
Regards, Joerg

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A former manager used to say "it's hard to beat the bandwidth of a 747 filled with 9-track tapes".

I don't recall having that much trouble with Compuserve even in the early days. Maybe US phone lines are a lot noisier than here?

Second generation VLBI did it with a truck load of standard VHS cassettes using a custom modulation scheme to store blocks of 300GB per session. S2 recorders could do 128Mbits/s for 5 hours the hardware was expensive. The previous generation were open reel and harder to use.

There were only a handful of correlators in the world that could actually read this format so the media had to be moved to use them. All participating scopes had to have a recorder and H2 maser clock.

Regards, Martin Brown

This was about 22 years ago, 2400 baud modems were still newish and

9600 baud modems were expen$ive to buy and there was a big premium 9600 baud access.

Not a company, a university based server.

The other end was never connected to Compuserve, for that matter neither was I; too expensive.

All i had was a telephone number for the server, no student body list (let alone with telephone numbers), no known contact points of any kind for anybody there. All that server did was send and receive files, no access to anything else, not even email.

It is not like being a local U, i was in Lost Angeles and Clarkson is on the EAST coast, no chance to go to the campus and find a student. No email address to work with either, nor did i even have a personal email address back then.

Early PC dialup 9600 modems were not cheap or particularly reliable. ISTR The launch of low cost effective Rockwell chipsets was about 1991 with V32 MNP and fax built in. Prices plunged a couple of years later.

University servers were on EPSS, Arpanet or in the UK SRCnet/JANET from around the mid to late 70's. Dedicated networks for astronomers were already fully operational by end 1980. It was possible to move fairly big research datasets overnight across the backbone although you would get warnings for doing it too often.

Cheapskate.

In that era everybody who was anybody was on CIS even in the UK - including CEOs who needed help to logon every time they used it.

Regards, Martin Brown

All it would have taken is to contact a fraternity there :-)

Or an institute. At German universities we had a "Fachschaft" for each discipline and that was essentially a self-help type body consisting of older semester students that would help younger ones learn the ropes, form study circles and so on. If you'd toss a $50 bounty in there the whole room would have been abuzz in milliseconds. Ok, not all students had telephones back then (I didn't) but many did.

--
Regards, Joerg

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Huh? 1989 I had CompuServe. Being frugal (had just started self-employed) I opted for the budget plan. IIRC that was 10h/month for maybe $20, plus local phone charges which in Germany wasn't free. You had to find the dial-in node that incurred the least in telephone charges. If you exceeded the allotted CompuServe hours of your particular plan they'd charge you per minute overages but those were very reasonable, AFAIR less than 5c/min.

Pretty much any university could be reached via CompuServe. Not necessarily on CompuServe's native (meaning proprietary) net of course but they had lots of Gateways. Used them many times.

BTW, the best about CompuServe were their forums. Just like Usenet but moderated.

--
Regards, Joerg

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