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GeekBits Podcast #5 - When the science IS the fiction

🕑 Added 2021-10-06 17:00:14 +0000 UTC

Comments

Kaz Redclaw

Perhaps the protocol was just really inefficient and the lag was high, I think some of those old protocols didn't send ahead more than one packet at a time and had to do a round trip for each one, and had small packet sizes.

The 8-Bit Guy

Hmmm.. Well, I just did some math and it seems it would take about 83 minutes to transfer 180K. Of course that's without any error checking, etc. I'm not really sure why it took so long. Maybe my memory is faulty. But I certainly remember game downloads taking all night on 300 baud. I remember going to bed, waking up in the morning and seeing the download was still going.

Kaz Redclaw

Listening to episode 6, there doesn't seem to be a post for it yet, but you said 8 hours for a floppy? A single sided double density floppy should have only been about an hour and a half at 300 baud. What kind of discs and modem were you using? I ran my own BBS for a long time, starting with a 1200 baud, and by the end I had a 33.6kbaud modem, but I only ever used them on PC compatible systems.

Pete Doherty

Another solid episode! Anyone looking to go deep on Back to the Future should check out the Back to the Future Minute podcast. They do dig into some of the "bad science" featured in the movies but at a more superficial level.

Asaf Sagi

Earlier in my career I was a User Experience designer. My biggest pet peeve is the ridiculous UI I see in action and sci-fi movies. The worst offender being the sound that computers make when information is being drawn on screens. Who the hell imagines computers to do that? Not in the future, not today and guess what - not even in the past! I highly recommend this book if anyone's interested in reading about UX and UI in sci fi: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009EGPJCU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Good podcast