He gave me the number of his telephone with a modem hooked up, and then, several times, I again suffered the vagaries of global phone communications before a line finally opened up and I heard the familiar tone of a modem. I reached for my own modem, a slim blue box, and switched over from “TALK” to “DATA.” Then I hit the return key on my Kaypro, firing up the BSTAM program.
My screen flashed word that the connection was in progress, and I was about to slap Eric on the back, but I waited, and quite rightly, for as the seconds wore on, the connection was still progressing. Something was amiss. By voice Clarke said my transmission hadn’t registered in his computer memory—not even the mere existence of my electronic file.
I called Michael Scott, a technician at Business Computing International, Clarke’s New York computer store. He sent a Telex to Clarke. Was Clarke using the normal 300-baud modem speed matching mine? I learned a day or so later that he was. “Well,” I asked Michael, “how long has it been since Clarke last communicated with you [the store] through the modem?”
“Months.”
“Okay,” I said, “maybe he needs a refresher on how to set up the modem program.” Patiently, Michael ran through the procedures.
Half an hour later I again was braving surly operators and busy signals to place another call to Sri Lanka.
“What you want to do,” I told Clarke, “is type RXN B:ODYCORR.TXT, then a carriage return, then select ANSWER when you see the prompt.” Clarke, however, hadn’t been doing it that way. We tried again, and for the next ten minutes my screen kept flashing dozens of confirmations of the connection.
Then our computer link broke.
I called Clarke back. Surely at least the start of the electronic file had shown up on the B disk, the one on which he was to store my questions. “No,” he said, “I don’t see it.” Clarke, it seems, had forgotten to put a floppy disk in his B drive. It was a very excusable mistake—this whole modeming procedure was still a novelty to him—and we failed yet another time even with Scott’s instructions followed exactly.[[86]]
So a few days later I settled on another tack: getting Clarke a free Kaypro II.