[vox] Hello from my Atari

[T. Mark]

It's tempting to quote each of your tales & reflect.. but time limitation permits only my "quick" look back:
My first experience of immensely-slow networking was way before I got to the access-to-hardware, coding siutuation--  before even obsessing with the mindblowing new thing at the mall miles away-- Pong on a Fairchild etc.  A friend of my mom's worked at Burroughs & a few times he brought over an acoustic coupler modem (300.. or was it even 110 or 150??)  and we played a text-based Star Trek game..  fun as could be, you'd have to figure out the angle to shoot your phasers/torpedoes based on the little ascii map on the printout.. what a blast!  Such tech was otherwordly and surely must have effected me..
Our Jr. High was fortunate to have a couple great math teachers, who got 3 Apple ]['s to stick in a little side room, where a few of us math whizzes were invited to spend lunch hour..  no modem "fun" there, just stuff like playing Lemonade and Oregon Trail & messing with BASIC a little.  A bit later I had the suburbanite Priveledge to be able to afford an insanely expensive Apple ][--  (price hadn't dropped much even though theyd been out a longtime.. probably shoulda bought an Orange or some such)  and was stuck with 300 baud for the longest time.. just reading/typing on a bbs was doable but downloading wares was pretty ridiculous.  Then the AppleCat modem came out--  300 but did 1200 at half duplex!  The bbs software utilizing it spawned lots of games downloading by us kids--  and it was really cool as it had chat built-in so that it'd attach your typing to the end of each packet/chunk while it took basically all night to grab a few 143k floppies' worth.
Then high school was like a luddite study.. teletype machines into the regional HP3000 to do our Fortran.  They actually started us out on punch cards, just to give us the feel.  Something I still advocate -- that and training on manual typewriters to begin with as well (ours was 8th or 9th grade)..  makes you appreciate where the keys are, with true muscle memory.  Then there was Pascal offered on Apple ][s.. cool language, which at University was then the major starter language, & rightly so.  On the software side I remember lots of effort going into getting PPTP to work with a consarned Dos machine--  I dont think it was 3.1 GUI yet at that point..  patching together all the needed stuff found on Simtel archives..  wow how I wish I'd avoided the MS universe altogether and could have back the vast swathes of my life wasted trying to debug Windows.
Along the lines of your project, I do remember figuring out pinouts to a cool little cube 9600 modem (Telebit?) & tearing apart a rs-232 cable to stick into the holes-- fastest I'd experienced to that point, having run a 2400 on my Apple2 for a long time.   And now Google continues to take Android further & further from OASP..  anyone using Lineage?

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