[vcf-midatlantic] Telebit, was Re: Hayes 300bps SmartModem for museum exhbit?

[Dave McGuire]

On 1/30/20 9:13 PM, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
> Most imporantly, it has been pointed out that I gave short shrift to the
> Telebit referring to it as merely a "business" modem. It was a very
> popular modem for Unix types using UUCP
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP> particularly because of its early
> success at 9600 bps (in a 2400bps world) through the proprietary PEP
> protocol. I also believe PEP was valued for some time even past the
> standards V.32 and V.32bis as a more reliable protocol for such things.

  Oh those were indeed "the days". :-)  I've run lots of Usenet news
servers, starting in the mid-80s all on modems using UUCP before moving
into the ISP world and doing it over IP.  In fact at Digex in the early
days, our primary news feed was done on a "side channel" modem to give
it dedicated bandwidth.

  A pair of Telebit Trailblazers would easily move 4MB/hr.  PEP was
wonderful.  With UUCP, the line turnaround time was a real problem; on
ordinary modems it would really kill UUCP performance.  Telebit
Trailblazers took care of that by spoofing parts of the UUCP G protocol,
unbeknownst to the host, and that sped things up considerably.

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA