Baud dates

Received an invite for an ANSI art showing from a friend:

She writes:

Remember the BBS days? I spent half of the 90’s on them…Wow! That dates me. An old friend is curating a collection of ANSI art at 20 goto 10 and it really makes me feel nostalgic. A lot of awesome work from the group, ACiD. I hear some of the artists are flying out too. Oh, and because I know this is what you really want to know…free drinks!

I read that and thought:

ANSI? The 90’s? That’s the lap of luxury, I tell you! You guys had 14.4k in the 90’s! If you wanted to be dated, try the days when most of the BBSs were on 300 baud (off AppleCat modems) because nobody could afford a Hayes Smartmodem at a blazing 1200 baud! And then the BBS knocked you off the only time you could get on their single telephone line because they had to transmit its Echomail over FidoNet. @#&$!

Imagine your ascii porn coming down at 300 baud. Frustrating as hell, I tell you!

—Grumpy Old Terry

ASCII terry

An ASCII art conversion of “Terry Chay” by Cal Evans

view original size to see the ascii characters.


Those of you who can remember know that there were pretty much only two decent ascii pr0ns back then. And since screens couldn’t show more about two dozen lines vertically, recall the excitement in the computer lab when the line printer finally got to the nipples! Yes, that experience then dates me, and it definitely goes a long way to explain why I don’t get any dates now 😉

3 thoughts on “Baud dates

  1. Haha, awesome, I remember the days of dial up and had to relive it doing WAN’s in a networking dip, those were some long hours spent in the labs.

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