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[Charlemagne 8]

Did you ever notice that it's very difficult to get elementary information?
I bring this up because I  found an answer to a question that no one seemed able to answer... for years.  I have often wondered, especially when using a 56K modem, why the download speed seemed to be roughly 10% of the connection speed. I have asked a few computer techs and got responses varying from "the look" (you know the one --- "you poor ignorant slob") to "Move your computer closer to the phone jack".  And "We'll be glad to come out and take a look to see how to resolve your problem." At $50 to $100 bucks an hour, it's not that big of a problem.
I finally found out when perusing an Earthlink website (last week, actually).  The modem is rated at 56 Kilobits. The meter that I used for measuring my download speed was showing me the speed in Kilobytes. 12.5% is roughly 10% at a glance. This may be incorrect but it makes sense.
Why could no one tell me this?

Reminds me of another similar story. When trying to figure out trigonometry (on my own ... my teachers deemed me too stupid to catch on and recommended that I take business math. In 1950's public schools that meant learning to balance a checkbook) I was asking a few engineers that I worked with how things like cosines, sines and tangents were derived.
I always want to go back to the basics and understand why things work.
They didn't know (or for some reason wouldn't tell me). They had just memorized how and when to use them in the formulas and had never questioned the origin. Degreed and licensed engineers. Go figure.

CVIII

[JimH]

Why could no one tell me this?

I don't recall hearing the question.

[JustinChase]

Why could no one tell me this?

I don't recall hearing the question.

You were too busy fishing Matt out of the lake.

[Doof]

Why could no one tell me this?

I could have told you that. There are 8 bits in a byte. So you'd have to divide the number you thought you should be getting by 8 to see the real number. Another thing that may be confusing your calculations is that your modem doesn't really connect at 56kb, it's really only like 53, which is, IIRC, an FCC limitation on transfer speed over phone lines at the frequency that voice data (standard phone calls, analog modems) uses.

It's the same reason I laugh when people brag about having Gigabit (not byte) ethernet cards in their PCs, but don't realize that the bottleneck is still their DSL connection.

Or when people wonder why their 200GB drive only shows up as 187GB in Windows. They don't realize that the hard drive manufacturers are using base 10 to derive the size of their drives (1000 bytes = 1 MB, 1000 MB = 1 GB), when the actual computer is using base 2 (1024 bytes = 1 MB, 1024 MB = 1 GB).

I think what happens is that the people who weren't around when this technology came to be never learn the why of it. It's the same thing from people that complain about Windows XP being hard to use. I just laugh and tell them to try getting a game to run under DOS, with sound and a game controller, and then get back to me about how "difficult" XP is.

[Alex B]

My first experience with PC was a 10 MHz 286 with 1 MB of memory and a huge 20 MB HD. Even that first one was a homemade PC (and all others since then except one laptop). I bought the parts myself. A friend who worked in a PC shop gave me a shopping list and assisted in building it. I also bought some software: MS-DOS 3.3, PC-Tools for MS-DOS and Microsoft Word for MS-DOS. I spend quite a long time staring the C:\ prompt, reading the software manuals and trying to find out how to continue. The year was 1989.

After 15 years of PC experience and about 15 homemade PCs I am still in trouble sometimes.

For example, this happened yesterday: After years of using Zone Alarm firewalls one of my PCs suddenly lost all ZA configuration settings. I tried to find out the reason and the things only got worse. I ended up with XP rebooting every time it tried to load ZA at system startup. Nothing helped. I had to uninstall ZA in Safe Mode. Every time I reinstalled ZA the reboot cycle started again (I tried several ZA versions). I am now using Kerio firewall with that PC.

[IanG]

I give talks on astronomy to all age groups from primary school children to adults.  I've always maintained that adults test my knowledge, but children test my understanding.  It turns out I understand a lot less than I know!

Ian G.

[Charlemagne 8]

I don't recall hearing the question.

I did ask here once in an oblique way. By the time I discovered Interact, I had given up on finding the answer.

My first every day computer was an HP 86B with dedicated ROM programming. They had some for very specialized environments. Mine was for land surveying. That was around 1980. We (my company) also had an IBM AT. I did a spreadsheet once for some bridge-deck elevations but that was about all I ever used it for.

My first home computer was an IBM PC Jr. It had TWO 5-¼" floppy disks. Fancy. It also had a 1200 bps modem. There were a few BBS's but they were usually long distance so they didn't get much use. I don't remember the year. Mid 80's, I think. DOS 2.0. I would have loved to get my hands on 3.3.

CVIII