Re: But is UseNet "Social Media"??

On 2026-02-02 10:39, Paul wrote:
> On Mon, 2/2/2026 3:56 AM, Daniel70 wrote:
>> On 2/02/2026 12:17 am, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>> On 2026-02-01 13:34, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
>>>> On 2/1/2026 6:17 PM, Daniel70 wrote:
>>>>> On 1/02/2026 8:38 pm, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The same goes to Fidonet BBS.
>>>>>>
>>>>> Never got into BBS's so couldn't possibly comment.
>>>>
>>>> Echomail is the technology used by Fidonet to run a distributed messaging network like Usenet. Back then, it ran on top of dial-up
>>>> modems as slow as 1200 baud. Those were the days! :)
>>>
>>> For some strange reason, Fidonet continued working in Rusia after it
>>> stopped in Europe. They took over the development of software, too.
>>>
>>> For a while at least, I could participate in Fidonet using internet instead of a modem.
>>
>> Sorry! What?? I've never used Fidonet but, I'm guessing, the Ones and
>> Zeros being produced by your Computer would have had to be converted to
>> varying Tones to traverse the Phone Network someway .... which is what a
>> Modem does.
>>
>> I suppose you could have had a Modem Board with-in the Computer which
>> then produced the varying tones required to traverse the Phone network.
>>
>>> Then my uplink failed, his computer broke down and he gave up. Could
>>> not find another suitable node.
> 
> The WinModem was a device based on having an audio chip
> in a computer. It used voice frequency samples, for handling
> modulated voice band transmissions. It saved money by not
> having a DataPump and DSP code in hardware. It uses the
> computer main processor for the DSP calculations.
> 
> What the WinModem needed, was a DAA, a Data Access Arrangement.
> Using that thing, that provided some measure of "immunity" to
> POTS. For example, if you discharged a thousand volts into the
> RJ11 phone wire, none of that would make its way through
> the DAA and blow up the computer. That is the part that always
> must be provided, in some way, for a connection to POTS to be
> sorta "safe". If the 11kV wire on the power pole in my backyard,
> were to fall on the phone line, then if I had a modem I could be
> kissing some part of the computer goodbye. Even with a DAA.
> 
> A fully provisioned modem, such as a Courier, it had a "datapump"
> running at 85MHz. It had firmware. It talked modem-talk. That
> was better than a WInModem, at least at the beginning.
> 
> When I got my laptop, one of the things I tested, was the
> WinModem in the laptop, and it actually *beat* the Courier
> on goodput in a 56K mode. And to do that, the core CPU on
> the laptop donates about "100MHz worth of DSP activity"
> to do the job over the Winmodem audio path. The DSP
> sorts the tones in "buckets", the same sort of bucket
> or bin scheme that ADSL uses in a sense.
> 
> In the early days, you could use a PLL to decode the tones.
> Just going from memory, the CD4046 Phase Detector II output
> 
>     https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cd4046b.pdf
> 
>     https://www.eleccircuit.com/cd4046-datasheet-phase-locked-loop/
> 
> uses flip flops and a state machine, and it should be a
> -2Pi to +2Pi phase detector. The distinguishing thing
> about such a phase detector, is it can do a wide range
> clock, without a harmonic lockup problem. The other phase
> detector, shown as a simple XOR gate, that can harmonic lock
> so you could have a 1KHz input and the VCO could be running
> at 3KHz in response. Whereas with phase detector II, a
> a 1KHz input gives 1KHz output, a 5KHz input gives 5KHz output.
> And we don't particularly care about the clock. We care about
> the control voltage driving the VCO. It might measure 1 volt at
> 1KHz and 5 volts at 5KHz and exhibit a linear relationship
> between frequency and voltage. Then, if your "POTS phone had
> the tones", the VCO control voltage was a voltage domain
> copy of what frequency was being carried at the moment.
> It's F2V conversion.
> 
> I think you can imagine the hobbyist excitement at this point :-)
> 
> F2V conversion, may have worked fine with the ZX81 tape recorder
> interface, but eventually the "sea of tones" on modem connections
> was just too much for the "PLL crowd". That's when the DSP boys
> took over. And DSP is how we got from 1200baud to 53300baud
> (a little short of the marketing 56K).

But my problem with Fidonet was not a problem with my modem, but a 
problem with my upstream link, my node. The modem worked perfectly, 
although at the time I might have been using an ADSL connection.

Fidonet was a network of Nodes, aka BBSs. We connected to them by 
phoning them directly. The software optimized the phone call to keep 
them short. Some were long distance.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet>

I connected to Fidonet early in the 90's, and to Internet in the late 90's.


In the subject of winmodems, I bought one by mistake. At that time I 
double booted to Linux, and that blasted thing would not work in Linux 
at all. I think I resold it to a friend what was a happy Windows user.


-- 
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;