Some people don't believe me when I tell them I've owned a home computer, with peripherals, that cost more than a new car of the same model year. Not just one, either.
When you started adding storage, a modem, daughter boards, etc., it got expensive.
You're not kidding. We sold truckloads of Kaypro II systems to college students because they were cheaper than the several thousand dollar IBM PC equivalents. Kaypro experimented with various bundles that included different word processing software but very few people had a preference of Wordstar vs Perfect Writer.
The only controversial part of any sale was the printer housing; because at the time our local professors would not accept anything printed with dot matrix we sold bundles that included a daisywheel printer. People thought we were upselling by telling them they really needed a foam-padded printer enclosure. Spending two or three hundred more on top of an already expensive purchase was often too much so people would skip the enclosure. They were usually back in a week or two looking to purchase the printer stand.
I didn't get into it until the 14400 baud modems came out and the prices dropped precipitously. I remember we had one for the Mac that plugged into the keyboard/mouse port (ADB) which I thought was pretty weird at the time.
Then I went to school and got a PC and an ISA modem. Turns out it was a precursor to the Software Modems (Winmodems) that came out a couple of years later. It had all of the hardware to negotiate the connection and modulate the data, but offloaded the error correction and compression to the host os. Of course the drivers only worked on Win3.1, so I had to go without most of the time. Turns out it was actually better for gaming since they added latency and my phone lines were clean enough that it wasn't an issue. The only bad thing is that if someone picked up the phone, even for a second, you would lose your link. It just couldn't recover.
It's a shame someone didn't understand, or take a moment to read up on the difference between bps and baud.
bps refers to the actual amount of data that is being shifted, in terms of 1's and 0's.
baud refers to signally changes per second.
While parent first started using dial-up during the 14400 bps era, I first started using dial-up during the 300bps (v.21) and a little while, and arguably a little worse, dabbled in 75bps during the exciting 1200/75 era (v.23) which, while asymmetric, at least offered effectively duplex communications. Just like today, assumed data flow was generally asymmetric for consumer use - a fairly safe assumption.
Anyway, on a 300bps modem, there was one bit of data transferred per signally change, so they were indeed also 300 baud modems.
v32.bis came along and offered 14400 bps -- a magical leap, but also painful for consumers as there were a number of competing "standards" or variations put out by over-eager manufacturers, and incompatibility issues were common.
But ultimately they all (AFAIK) encoded 6 bits per signally change, and so were 2400 baud modems.
Fascinating area of CS, and well worth reading up on. Start with Claude Shannon and his law.
Did you ever use 1200/75 in the reverse mode? You could get the modem to dial e.g. PRESTEL in the UK and train as a 'server' so the speeds were reversed. This gives a 75/1200 connection with 75bps down and 1200bps up, which was useful for uploading files, but meant you had a 75bps speed terminal, slower even than an original IBM selectric teletype, at 135bps!
I think I heard about this feature, but in AU there wasn't (or probably I just didn't know about them) the kinds of services where this was available or would be useful.
Most of my dial-up use was local BBS's or access into a (paid) university offering that gave me usenet and email. In both cases it was very heavy ratio of down:up - but IIRC the 1200/75 arrangement was very brief before the arrival of 9600bps.
After I left university, all I had was a (free) 2400bps connection to a modem bank on an X.25 PAD system, accessible to alumni - fortunately PPP existed and I could bring up TCP/IP over the link, at least... I actually feared this would be the only Internet access I would have from then on. Soon after that, commercial dial-up Internet access became more prevalent and I upgraded to the dizzy heights of 14k4bps and beyond!
Another thing from those days that we no longer need is something called a 'midnight line' - British Telecom in the UK offered this; although I never had one I knew of people who did. It was a phone line that was unmetered from 00h00 through to 08h00 or so, which allowed BBS and Usenet users to dial up for free across the country and exchange mail and news feeds. Phone charges at that time were prohibitively expensive, especially nationally, plus local calls were not free in the UK and things like 0800 numbers for POPs were still unheard of.
