Baud

baud.c is a program to simulate going through a modem. It reads stdin, and prints it to stdout at the provided baud rate (bits per second).

Building

Download baud.c. Change to that directory, and type

make baud

That will generate a file named baud in whatever directory you're in. If you like, you can put it in ~/bin or ~/.local/bin or /usr/games/bin or wherever you prefer.

Running

If you'd like to see what life was like when I got my first modem, try

cat file | ./baud 110 40

Run that for a few hours, then try

cat file | ./baud 1200 20

And you will understand how mind-blowingly fast 1200 baud modems were at the time.

frotz zork1.zip | ./baud 4800

Gives Zork a retro vibe, without being so slow that it's aggravating. I don't think more than a dozen or so people every played Zork over a modem link, but whatever.

Why

Every 10 years or so, somebody asks me for this program. I don't know why.

The other day it happened again, and I couldn't find it soon enough, so I just wrote it again from scratch. I'm putting it on my web site so I don't have to write it again.

License

I'm placing this in the public domain. So there's no license.

Some jurisdictions don't recognize the existence of a public domain. If you live in one of those, you can use the terms of Creative Commons 0.