[anonymousiam]

It sounds like we've had some similar experiences, but you must be about 10 years younger than me. I got my ham license because I was interested in packet radio. 1200 baud AFSK was all that there was for the my first few years. (Of course there were still some people doing AFSK FM RTTY in the VHF bands then too.) I did both HF and VHF packet and had a lot of fun. Later, when 9600 baud started to become a thing, I modified my Kenwood TM-721A and got on the air with it. I was pretty proud of the mod. I put a new mini-DIN connector on the rear panel, and it looked like it came that way from the factory. The insides were not as clean, because when I drilled the new hole in the back for the mini-DIN, the drill bit went in too far and tore out a bunch of wires. It was "fun" to repair it. I picked up a Tiny-2 TNC that supported 9600 and I went mobile with my TRS-80 Model 102. I left the Kantronics KAM Plus connected to my base stations. (It could support both HF 300 and VHF 1200 at the same time!) My base stations used a Kaypro II (CP/M) for the packet terminal.

When I first started out with packet, everybody was doing unproto AX.25 through a digipeater on Mt. Wilson. (I think it was on 145.09 MHz.) I met a lot of people and made some new friends. It became less fun when more and more people were getting on the air, because of the limited bandwidth available. To help with the congestion, people began putting up "nodes", which you would "connect" to instead of operating unproto. I remember when APRS started, and it was also gobbling up a lot of precious bandwidth.

As the first common standard for AX.25 used AFSK (on a 16 KHz FM channel with 5KHz deviation), we were pretty much stuck at 1200 baud. To make the move to 9600, you had to switch to pure FM and ditch the AFSK layer. Pure FM is far less efficient than all of the modern modulation and coding techniques available today (in the DSP era). Once a bunch of people begin to use a particular frequency with a particular type of modulation, it's pretty hard to get them all to change, and you cannot really have more than one type of modulation on an FM channel, because the users of each type will see the opposing type as harmful interference.

I'm vaguely aware of a bunch of far more efficient coding techniques that some people are using today, LoRa is a good example of one, and you don't even need a ham license to use it. (See top level post in this thread.)