Viatel was my introduction to networked computing in Australia in the late 1980s. The trusty old Commodore 64 sucked down those pages line at a time through the 300/75 baud modem. Yes, that’s 300 bps down and 75bps up…
Then came BBSes and FidoNet and the blazingly fast 1200 baud modem and the NEC APC-III (Advanced Personal Computer, with IBM incompatible MS-DOS [until you bought the SLE])… but that’s another story…
🙂
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Is that the dad from Hey Dad??
Haha, ignore me, I didn’t even notice the title of the Youtube clip itself.
Ahhh….those were the days!
Viatel was waaaaay cool.
Ah, Viatel. I was cleaning out my filing cabinet when I found some old copies of a newsletter called “Signet”. It was a publication for members of the service on Viatel called “Microtex 666”.
So, I decided to google it and see what mention or archives of the service were out there. I got two hits – one to a personal website of someone, and this.
Viatel, if I remeber correctly, ran on a unique modem standard of 1,200/75 bits/sec, not 300/75. Certainly, it did for me when I bought my first modem, a Nice Modem II, which ran at this speed. This was in June 1986. It cost me $499. At CPI we’re probably looking at close to $3k in today’s money.
It was an amazing experience for someone who never saw an online service before. But it was also expensive, something that Telecom, nowdays Telstra, seemed to excel at.
Thanks for the video. It brought back memories.
Martin : You are correct , that service did run at 1200/75 baud . I still have my old modem 🙂
Cheers
Wit
Ahhh Viatel. The playground of my then 10 year old self. My adapter for c64 was 300/75 lol. I could nearly out type it! I figured out how to cheat in those terrible ascii games and won a Walkman from Ace Videotext. Such fond memories and way ahead of its time. A first taste of the internet before the internet. We used to receive a “directory” magazine once a month too if I recall.