[HN Gopher] Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2...
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Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001)
Author : edent
Score : 107 points
Date : 2023-11-19 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forums.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forums.anandtech.com)
| saithound wrote:
| Title should say (2001). Although it's evidently funnier this
| way.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| In 2000 or 2001 I ended up having to crash at my high school one
| night. Rehearsal had gone late, till 11 or midnight, and I was
| stuck. Not that big of a deal, the drama department had
| everything I needed. Showers, beds, clothes. It was fine. They
| also had a couple computers to control lights and sound stuff,
| but they weren't connected to the internet. No worries I thought,
| I know all my family's dial up info, I can log in via that. So I
| did. I was a little perplexed that it came in under speed (56k
| modem, but I was only able to get a 28k or 22k baud connection. I
| forget exactly but it was somewhere in that range). I was curious
| enough that I asked around with the IT staff the next day and got
| confused stares all around, apparently with the types of phone
| lines the school had a dial up connection shouldn't have been
| possible AT ALL. This was some sort of big deal to the point they
| even had to follow up with their telephone provider and there was
| some question about if they were bilking the school out of paying
| for a certain kind of connection but delivering something else. I
| was obviously cut out of the loop at that point but it led to
| some high drama behind the scenes.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. The service was better than expected?
|
| In my experience you would pay for a minimum service. When we
| paid for 56k dial-up Bell came in and replaced things until we
| could achieve 56k. It's just a noise game. So I imagine it's
| possible that the existing lines were decent enough to begin
| with?
| bityard wrote:
| My guess is the IT "department" didn't know the difference
| between dialup and ISDN.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| At least in the schools I did volunteer tech support in the
| early 00s (in LA, while I was in Middle and High School),
| the phones in the classrooms were meant to dial into the
| school's own switchboard and not to the outside world.
| Maybe that was possible? My supervising teachers always
| seemed to walk to the central office to make calls they
| didn't want to use their 300 cell phone minutes on
| (remember that fun?).
|
| The school school had ISDN and then T1 and every computer
| was networked (even LC IIs) so I don't think anyone would
| have bothered trying dialup. In fact, I definitely took
| advantage of the fast line to download Linux ISOs and other
| things they were ok with me doing in the off instruction
| hours.
|
| We even had a small AirPort installation that came care of
| a donation from Universal Studios or Disney. I had a lot of
| fun retrofitting an old Rincon 802.11/802.11b card to work
| with Apple's Mac OS 8 drivers.
|
| Good memories I am happy to not reproduce given today's
| advancements.
| saxonww wrote:
| This kind of sounds like the line was provided by PBX and
| they didn't expect modems to work well or at all.
| don-code wrote:
| When I was younger, I connected via 56k modem over the PBX
| at my parents' shop. My connection speeds topped out at
| 33.6k.
|
| Under the hood, V.90 (the standard for 56k modems) expects
| that there's only a single digital-to-analog conversion,
| seen from the ISP's side. The line down from the ISP to the
| consumer is digital PCM until the last mile. In the
| opposite direction from the consumer back to the ISP,
| analog trellis modulation is still used. This is why you
| still typically only see 33.6k upload speeds on a V.90
| modem.
|
| Many PBXes will introduce an additional analog-to-digital
| conversion in the unit itself, before converting back to
| analog and putting the signal back on the wire to the
| street. V.90 can't tolerate that extra conversion, so a
| connection at 56k speeds fails, and the modem backs down to
| V.34 / 33.6k, which is perfectly usable on a fully analog
| line.
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| This is 20 year old memories so I may have some of the
| details wrong, but the gist was the school had rolled out an
| early IP telephony solution and the landlines were just rj-11
| patch cables into a monolithic IP telephony box that assigned
| each line a number and shouldn't have been capable of
| handling the dial up connection through that
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Sounds like an interesting mystery. If a human can talk, a
| modem can talk. It's analog after all. Maybe the IP
| abstraction meant, "there's quantization happening that
| makes it technically impossible for a modem to talk at any
| sensible baud rate. There's still some circuit switched
| stuff going on here that we shouldn't be paying for."
|
| Now I'm curious to see what baud rate can be achieved over
| today's VOIP lines!
| bbarnett wrote:
| I've used analog fax over SIP in the last few years, with
| ulaw, usually very successfully.
|
| Not sure if it linked at 9600 or what, didn't pay
| attention.
| epcoa wrote:
| > If a human can talk, a modem can talk. It's analog
| after all.
|
| That's an oversimplification, especially for 56k where
| the signal isn't analog in the sense of the slower speeds
| and uses PAM (pulse amplitude modulation) that is trained
| at the beginning of the call (it can be retrained but
| that is long and drawn out). Central offices had to be
| upgraded and basic u-law quantization meant 56k was a no
| go even on most classic POTS lines. There's a bit more to
| it than just "noise."
|
| For VoIP, Amplitude distortion and quantization error
| (from multiple sources) means you will never get 56k over
| any voip system. Phase distortion and echo cancellation
| make other speeds frustrating. Doing better than 9600 is
| going to be difficult.
|
| My guess is the OP was not dealing with an IP system
| (sounds less likely for a school in 2000). In any event
| they noted they could not achieve 56k which is expected
| that they were not able to establish a PAM link over the
| PBX, but the channel was good enough for analog FSK
| modulation. That they could have achieved 28k pretty much
| rules out any IP system with an ATA of that vintage .
| ghaff wrote:
| Way back when my dad had an analog POTS connection at his
| rural Maine house. It worked fine for voice calls but it
| was flaky to non-existent for a modem connection, to
| which the telco basically went <shrug>.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you go back in time, you want to test it with faxing,
| if it doesn't work for data modem, it probably doesn't
| work well for faxing, and if it doesn't work for faxing,
| the telco might actually fix it.
| FrankPetrilli wrote:
| > For VoIP, Amplitude distortion and quantization error
| (from multiple sources) means you will never get 56k over
| any voip system
|
| https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/
|
| I've done V.90 over VoIP. In a very controlled
| environment that was tuned for it, but VoIP nonetheless.
| The main issue is that VoIP timing, even with deep
| buffers, is prone to more jitter than a PDH network and
| the phase drift will eventually cause enough errors to
| force a retrain every few minutes. Either way, "never" is
| a little too absolute IMHO. :)
| epcoa wrote:
| Fair enough. How about V.92? Have you had a setup where
| upstream PCM could be successfully established?
| FrankPetrilli wrote:
| Good question - it's been almost two years since this
| project so I don't recall whether V.92 came up at all,
| even on a pure T-1 setup. I still have all the gear, if I
| set it up and run it again I'll update this thread.
| simfree wrote:
| What gear were you using?
| RuggedPineapple wrote:
| I think this is exactly right for reasons that weren't
| important to the base story. The year after the story
| they moved to these Cisco VoIP phones that plugged into
| Ethernet directly, which seems odd considering they had
| just recently moved onto what was supposedly a Telco
| provided IP phone service. I suspect someone either
| misunderstood what they were buying or someone
| misrepresented what they were selling. They moved to what
| they thought they were getting in the first place and
| dropped the telco entirely.
|
| For schools of that time, there was an incredible amount
| of money flowing around in the dot-com era. At least for
| a high school in a state capital. Both Microsoft and
| Cisco sponsored classes and teachers for them at my
| school. I got semesters A and B of my CCNA as a credit
| giving elective. My first time using Linux was
| (ironically) in the Microsoft sponsored class.
| epc wrote:
| The school was likely using ISDN or some sort of digital phone
| setup and you lucked out. Hotels used to have a special data
| port on the room handset that you could use because the main
| line was digital (either ISDN or something else). Even then I
| could typically only get 28-33k, not the 53k (I never, ever got
| a pure 56k connection).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Cables are rated for data with a certain expectation of abuse.
| On a straight run, cat-5 UTP and cat-6 UTP are identical even
| though the former is rated for 100Mps and the latter for
| 10Gbps.
|
| But if you bend them around a corner and pull the cable tight,
| the pairs in the cat-5 will become separated while the pairs in
| the cat-6 will stay mostly paired (electrons running in
| opposite directions create fields which negate each other, this
| is spoiled if the stands separate. Then the cable becomes
| noisy).
|
| It would be similar with baud rates and phone lines. Probably
| the school's setup wasn't of the sort that could typically
| handle data, so the telco had offered them some kind of
| expensive alternative, but the installers had had a gentle
| touch, so it actually could handle data.
|
| That, or the telco was just lying and trying to sell something
| the customer didn't need. Wouldn't be the first time that had
| happened.
| rr808 wrote:
| Its a big deal if a school computer network that wasn't
| connected to the internet suddenly you open up a direct route
| with no firewall or security.
| dwringer wrote:
| I know it wasn't the same everywhere, but back in 2001 my
| high school had an IT staff that consisted of a single
| teacher with no real technical literacy to begin with. There
| was no real sort of firewall or security, including the
| computers that were on the internet. It was kind of a
| different time.
| fgonzag wrote:
| I can hazzard a guess you weren't around back then. Computers
| weren't something everyone depended on... They were novelties
| oogali wrote:
| My guess is the telecom vendor your school selected told your
| school's IT and purchasing teams that their new phone lines
| cannot handle modem connections, so they would be obligated to
| buy a separate IP connectivity service from the same vendor.
|
| Being the early 90s, technical expertise about Internet
| connectivity was sparse and they most likely entered into a
| contract with this vendor on the strength of their statement.
|
| They were now surprised to find out the truth: that they
| could've kept using their existing paid-for modems instead of
| upgrading to a new, expensive, high-speed Internet, access
| circuit tied to a multi-year contract and all the requisite
| equipment that came along with that.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Definitely, dude. You were much more likely to get a stable and
| reliable connection from a hardware modem at a slower speed than
| from a soft modem that was trying for 56 kbits on a bad voice
| line.
|
| If anyone wants to brush up on their understanding of the Nyquist
| theorem, give yourself homework to find out why the highest speed
| ever offered on analog phone lines was 56 kbits. That's a nice
| Rabbit Hole to tour.
| retrac wrote:
| Channel capacity is b * log2 (1 + snr) where b is the bandwidth
| in Hz and snr is the linear signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| The voice passband in the old telephone system is 3 kHz. And 60
| dB SNR average over the passband was typical for a clear voice
| channel: 3000 * log2 1000000 = 59,800 bits
| per second.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Heh, where I lived 56k modems were useless. The telephone
| infrastructure was already using some kind of cheat where they
| effectively doubled up the number of voice calls that went over
| a single wire (and I can't for the life of me remember what
| this is called now). The most you could ever get would be 28.8,
| but more likely you'd get 24,000.
| don-code wrote:
| You're probably thinking of robbed bit signaling:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed_bit_signaling
|
| This wasn't quite doubling. Five out of six frames were
| sampled at full 8-bit resolution, while the remaining frame
| was sampled at 7-bit resolution (hence the "robbed bit"). The
| "doubling" is probably that you could run 24 digital lines
| with the 7/8-bit encoding, over the wires used by just two
| analog phone lines.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Robbed bit signaling was (is) used to encode signaling
| information on a digital circuit (typically a T1 in North
| America) without a dedicated signaling channel. There were
| a variety of multiplexing systems to get more than a single
| line on a copper pair, but they didn't have anything to do
| with robbed bit signaling.
| ac29 wrote:
| The linked forum thread talks about this, its called pair
| gain.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| If anyone else is curious now, this is one of the first Google
| results I found and quite the delightful, in-depth read
| explaining it:
|
| https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dia...
| zzzcsgo wrote:
| Those winmodems... Had a lot of issues with them, specially under
| Linux. I tried to avoid them like the plague.
| underseacables wrote:
| When I was 14 there was a power outage at Barnes & Noble. That's
| how I got my 28.8 modem.
| ksherlock wrote:
| For those that don't remember, a winmodem (aka softmodem) was
| smaller and cheaper because the modulation / demodulation was
| handled in software with host CPU and RAM. Using an external
| modem would free up CPU and RAM since it's handled in hardware.
| doubloon wrote:
| further radicalizing the open source movement. this was a
| massive deal with linux people back then since it threatened to
| shut linux off the internet, which would kill it. (if you take
| the idea to the extreme as young people do, that every network
| hardware device would soon require single-source proprietary
| software from a monopolistic corporation).
| rascul wrote:
| Old, surprised it's still up, and related:
|
| http://www.linmodems.org/
| throitallaway wrote:
| Holy heck, I remember using that. I'm so glad that the days
| of IRQ conflicts, Winmodems, etc. are past us.
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder how it is nowadays, PCI(e) sound cards are no longer a
| thing and are mostly on the motherboard (ok well the on-board
| chips are probably more powerful than chips on sound cards from
| x years ago), AMD's on-CPU GPU are quite powerful too. My
| network card^W chip has an option to off-load checksum
| calculations.
|
| Seems like there's enough spare CPU cycles even if some of them
| have been used for your written-in-Javascript IDE and written-
| in-Javascript messaging client.
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's less about total cycles and more about scheduling. You
| don't really want a real-time or low latency thing like sound
| to get preempted by another process.
|
| One of the problems with WinModems was they were sensitive to
| CPU load. In the nominal "browsing" case they might be fine,
| the average webpage wasn't going to load down the system too
| much. With something like gaming where the system was more
| stressed the modem could have weird latency issues or the
| driver could even crash.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Or have shitty drivers what would insert garbage in the
| received data, bad threading and memory management I
| supposec
|
| I still have mp3s with botched (and very audible) grabled
| parts, corrupted at downdload.
| dicriseg wrote:
| I was doing dialup internet support when these things hit the
| market. What a fucking mess. It's 25 years later and I still
| get anxious when the phone rings, because my brain thinks it
| might be a senior citizen who can't connect after they got a
| good deal on a new computer. Sometimes we could get them back
| on line with an init string, but often they needed new drivers.
| Walking someone through either of those over the phone was
| brutal.
|
| Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever
| take for granted!
| ryandrake wrote:
| I also briefly worked in Student IT support junior year of my
| university and "Winmodem" sent similar chills down my spine.
| An idea that never should have happened!
|
| You can boil a lot of tech changes down to either A: Let's
| take this problem that has been solved in hardware and move
| it to software! and B: Let's take this problem that has been
| implemented in software and bake it into hardware.
|
| Somehow, A is always a train wreck, and B usually pushes the
| abstraction stack upward and moves the industry forward. Yet,
| we as an industry keep trying A and expecting good results.
| dicriseg wrote:
| Yeah, in the case of winmodems/softmodems, it was because A
| is cheaper. Or, at least, you could externalize the costs.
|
| In our case, we technically did not support your hardware -
| you had to show up with a working modem. But in practice,
| if you want to retain your customers, you need to support
| their hardware. At one point we used to have CDs full of
| known good drivers for all of the common softmodems that
| we'd send out if we couldn't figure out a configuration
| workaround. Even then, I had a handful of discussions with
| folks where I basically told them that their thing wasn't
| going to work - they either needed a different modem, of
| which we'd recommend a few that we knew some stores
| carried, or they needed to find a way to cut down their
| line noise. I'm one of those types that takes it a little
| bit personally when I spend a bunch of time on something
| and still can't solve it, so that always sucked. Maybe you
| could say that wasn't strictly the modem's fault, but even
| the cheapest hardware modems had better tolerance for line
| noise.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think a lot of the problem was how difficult it was for
| the average computer user to tell the difference between
| a real modem and a Winmodem. Some manufacturers
| deliberately failed to distinguish them in marketing,
| pretending they were both "modems". Retailers were in on
| the scam, too. The whole puddle got muddied to the point
| where a savvy consumer needed to keep a whitelist of
| "real modem" make and model numbers with them going to
| the store. You could usually tell by the price, though,
| as you say they were cheap (garbage).
| dicriseg wrote:
| This is unlocking memories for me. I think we used to
| tell folks something like "If it's under $50 and Walmart
| sells it, that's a winmodem" or something like that.
|
| In theory, one of the selling points was that as
| standards changed, you would just upgrade your
| drivers/software and not buy a new modem. That probably
| made a lot of sense if you bought a USR Winmodem, but
| those $20 unbranded models were lucky to ever see an
| update. If you were lucky, you had a reference model and
| could use the OEM drivers which did occasionally get
| updated. But by the time these things came about,
| V.90/V.92 existed, and dialup standards were kind of
| frozen in that 56k-if-you-were-lucky state. There wasn't
| anything to upgrade to - you got DSL if you wanted more
| bandwidth over POTS lines, or you went to cable.
|
| Also I could be completely full of shit on the above.
| These are memories from 16-18 year old me.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Took maaaaaaany hours to for tech support to figure out why
| my $$$ 33.6k external modem worked sloooooooow. Often took
| them a lot of convincing that it was actually slow, a lot of
| early internet users had higher expectations, but I was
| coming from 2400bps service. Bazillions of failed packets
| reported in Windows Dial Up Networking.
|
| Finally found the person that figured it out. Computer only
| had an 8250 UART for the serial port. $35 ISA serial port
| card with 16550A UART solved it!
| dicriseg wrote:
| This was definitely when tech support could still be fun.
| We didn't have tiers or scripts or anything, just a handful
| of people on shift answering calls. You kind of loved when
| you got one like this when the customer calling in also had
| a good attitude about it. Probably because you knew the
| call was going to eat up at least a quarter of your shift,
| and you got to think a little. It sure beat the 10th time
| that day you were walking someone through uninstalling and
| reinstalling TCP/IP on Win95/98/ME.
|
| All these years later I really do still have anxiety when
| the phone rings, though. I have an irrational fear of
| picking up even when it's, like, my dad, or picking up the
| phone and having to call a business to ask a question or
| something.
|
| Do you happen to remember what sort of system you had that
| still had an 8250 but extended into the >14.4kbps era? Was
| this just a super old machine in the mid 1990's, or
| something in the 486+ range and the motherboard
| manufacturer had a lot of late 80's chip stock?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I suspect they enjoyed talking to me because I sounded
| like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body).
|
| It was a no-name 486 DX2 66MHz from "Consumer's
| Distributing" (defunct soviet-style Canadian retailer),
| and a cheap model at that. 8250 was probably a cost-
| cutting measure they felt like they could get away with.
|
| Most people probably bought internal modems so these UART
| issues wouldn't pop up. But we had bad experiences with
| IRQ conflicts locking up the mouse on a previous
| computer. Not an issue with Lynx/Pine/etc, but we wanted
| GUI and Netscape, so we were trying to avoid that. Unsure
| if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an
| internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate
| over ISA to the board's serial port?).
|
| It was a lot of calls, so I dutifully reinstalled the
| drivers and tried a lot of dialer strings.
| dicriseg wrote:
| > Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does
| an internal hardware modem run its own UART or
| communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).
|
| Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of
| them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ
| and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM
| pair.
|
| This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/
| support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It was probably unusual for this ISP to deal with a
| bargain basement computer, but a premium external modem,
| and the incompatibilities that can result.
| giraffe333 wrote:
| Worked at AOL tech support back in the day and I also still
| have the occasional flashback to the pain these so called
| modems caused us all.
| dayjah wrote:
| I worked at a non-AOL ISP as tech support back in the day
| and still have the occasional flashback to having to talk
| folks through uninstalling the custom TCP/IP stack the "Try
| AOL" CDs would install.
| dicriseg wrote:
| There needs to be a special kind of therapist for people
| like us.
| blackhaz wrote:
| I have a collection of retro stuff from my childhood - an
| XT, a 386DX-40, Pentium-133, a bunch of hard drives,
| motherboards, video and sound cards, and so on... I really
| love all this retro stuff. But one night on eBay I've
| stumbled upon the modem I've had - the MultiTech 28.8k. I
| didn't buy it.
| ryoshu wrote:
| I was around for the gold master of AOL 5.0 (Kilimanjaro).
| After the release we were pulled into a conference room to
| get on a call with Steve Case. You don't want to get on a
| call with the CEO immediately after a launch. It turns out
| our execs were installing 5.0 and then... couldn't get
| online. It hung with the modem init. As the person in
| charge of the QA lab I pulled all of our test run data.
| Couldn't duplicate on any of the dozens of machines. Sr.
| devs were running debuggers. Didn't see anything on their
| machines. We went into the office of our highest-level exec
| and borrowed his laptop.
|
| Winmodem. Dev hooked up a debugger and found the issue.
| There was a bug in the soft modem driver. Hot fix was
| released, but it was too late for the pressed CDs. Luckily
| it was an edge case on high-end laptops. That were issued
| to all of our execs with the buggy driver.
|
| Good times.
| jwells89 wrote:
| "Winmodem" brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based
| Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail
| end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had
| its hard drive fail.
|
| What a miserable machine that thing was. It might've been an
| upgrade on paper but between Windows 98 and the terrible
| hardware it was running on, it was a hopelessly crashy buggy
| mess that rendered any performance advantages it had over the
| Mac entirely moot.
|
| Within a span of 6 months we sold it and replaced it with a
| Dell Dimension 4100 that cost 3x as much and was much much
| better, especially after replacing its stock 98SE install with
| Win2K. We never bought bargain basement computers again after
| that.
| krooj wrote:
| Our family went through the same thing with a budget Celeron
| "MDG" computer running Windows 98. Awful. Keep in mind that,
| like you, I had previously used a IIsi and an LC630, so I
| figured... 300MHz, must be amazing?!?
|
| At some point later, my high school had surplus Powermac
| 7500/100s that were gifted from Nortel and I managed to snag
| one, paired it with a USR 56k external modem and it was a
| million times better than that Celeron econobox.
| comprev wrote:
| For me it brings back great memories of the first PC my folks
| bought for the family home where they asked _me_ what spec
| I'd like (Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 30GB disk, 17" CRT,
| Soundblaster Live! 5.1, Creative Labs 5.1 speakers). One
| might say it was the catalyst to what became my career - and
| love of gaming!
| chrsig wrote:
| freeing cpu/ram generally wasn't the motivator to get a
| hardware modem. winmodems required drivers that generally were
| only available for windows ("win"modem)
|
| at a consumer level, the only people that ever knew or cared
| were people trying to run linux or a bsd. h/w modems operated
| over a serial port, and didn't require any special kernel
| support.
| abirch wrote:
| That's how I learned about the kernel and modules. That and
| getting a CD ROM to work.
| bhumihang wrote:
| Funbhbnjhh
| dehrmann wrote:
| I just remember winmodem drivers always being finicky and
| rarely working.
| comprev wrote:
| Buying an external US Robotics 56k modem allowed me to get
| online with RedHat 8 (boxset purchased from Amazon, IIRC), as
| the PC I had contained a PCI Win-modem with no compatible Linux
| drivers. It was a friend at school who introduced me to Linux.
| Surfing the web at home on Linux in the early 00s felt like I
| was in niche club :-)
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Back in the day, Central Computer carried packaged RedHat and
| clear vinyl Slackware CD sets. One of the few brick and
| mortar computer and software store regional chains that still
| exist in the US, the other being MicroCenter.
|
| https://centralcomputer.com
|
| https://www.microcenter.com
|
| I worked at Egghead Software in high school and managed NFR
| pricing on Netcom. Egghead was one of the first chains to go
| under because it couldn't compete with the hypermarts like
| CompUSA and Fry's Electronics, both of which are now also
| defunct given way to BestBuy and Amazon.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Yep. Softmodems were hot garbage because they were generally
| Windows only.
|
| Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It also made your PC slow and crappy in general and they didn't
| work with real OSes. And they would often fail or crap out when
| you were doing something else (most windows was still DOS based
| and not fully multitasking back in those days) Yuck. Bottom of
| the barrel stuff.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| I never had a modem. In 2000 I was attending University living in
| a student hostel which had Internet by grace of allocated state
| budget. It was horrifyingly slow. No idea what the original
| connection was, but distributed through coaxial cable Ethernet to
| hundreds of students rooms, it was barely usable. Also I had no
| idea what I was doing, porn was one thing if by that you
| understand navigating webrings on Altavista and leaving one image
| to download overnight hoping by morning at least it starts to
| show something. First time I saw real Internet on my first job in
| 2001, a satellite downlink connection at 256 Kbit/sec (uplink was
| a regular modem), I couldn't believe such speed was possible.
|
| On the other hand the local LAN was a nonstop LAN-party, reaching
| peak usage during exams season, when everyone should have been
| learning but obviously they were hardly doing that between
| Counterstrike rounds and such.
| mkoryak wrote:
| Ah this brings back some memories.. I forgot all about having to
| connect to the Internet every day and how I could tell by the
| sounds the modulator demodulator made if the connection was going
| to succeed
| tomhoward wrote:
| My first full time job was doing phone tech support for dialup
| internet users for one of Australia's biggest ISPs in the late
| 90s. Many of the customers who'd call had just bought a new big-
| brand desktop PC (most commonly a HP Pavillion) with a winmodem
| in it, and so our job was to get it to work, even if their phone
| line was bad, or had other devices (fax machines, alarms,
| wireless phones) causing interference. We became very very
| familiar with the AT command sets to adjust the settings on all
| the different modem models, and with winmodems you'd often just
| have to slow it right down to 33k, 28k or even less.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| AT+MS=V34,1,2400,28800,2400,28800
| bbarn wrote:
| Man, this brings back memories - but I'm a little surprised 2001
| is appended to the title. In the mid-90's I got my first 56K
| modem and expected a world of faster connections only to realize
| every BBS I was on didn't support it anyway.
|
| By 2001 I think I had cable service, and most people in my area
| could get it (suburb of Chicago at the time)
| theodric wrote:
| Metros got the good stuff earlier! The little rural town in
| Illinois where I grew up, Bushnell, only got local dialup in
| early 1997, and something approximating broadband in
| about...2010(? I left in 2001); even that was lastmiled with
| wireless. I knew the guy that ran the dialup ISP. They managed
| to get a T1 to the bank HQ downtown and put their modem banks
| there. 33.6 when they launched, 53k a little later on, and I
| rarely saw it handshake faster than about 46k. But we were glad
| of every kilobit.
| Moto7451 wrote:
| Even in LA I don't think I saw much more than a brief burst
| of 53K. It really needed everything lined up correctly and my
| old building with too many party lines was a noisy mess.
| ac29 wrote:
| 56k wasnt standardized until 2000, though the draft was
| available a little earlier. There was also the very short lived
| K56flex and X2 technologies that came out in 1997, but ISP
| support and sales were pretty low.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| It would have been difficult (expensive) for a BBS to support
| 56k. The calling side modem could be on an analog POTS line,
| but the called side needed a digital circuit, usually a PRI (T1
| with ISDN signaling.) It was far easier for them to support
| 64/128kbps ISDN -- all they needed was one or more dual-channel
| BRI lines.
| throw555chip wrote:
| It's not related I guess but I remember connecting to CompuServe
| in 1983 with a 300 Baud modem to catch up on the digital world.
| andix wrote:
| If I remember correctly back then in the US local phone calls and
| also dial up wasn't charged per minute. What a heavenly place, we
| had to pay around 2$ per hour, which added up a lot if you wanted
| to go online for 2 hours every day.
|
| Then in 2000 DSL started to be available. Not billed per minute
| anymore, but per megabyte. 1GB was included per month and then it
| was around 7ct per megabyte. So once again very expensive. And
| no, there were no alternative providers available back then.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| My big bad national ISP used the same PPPoE authentication for
| dialup and DSL. So you could buy an unlimited dialup account
| and use those hours on DSL and chew through as much data as you
| wanted. Later on, some independent ISPs sold logins+passwords
| that you could use over the "Bell" DSL service and connect
| through them for unlim data.
|
| (I initially hated it when they switched their DSL service to
| PPPoE over whatever they had before, because the PPPoE overhead
| sucked up like 10-15% of your throughput... until I decided to
| run a little test...)
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| ISPs in the US initially used unmetered access to compete
| against legacy services like Compuserv that charged per-minute.
| It also helped that they didn't typically incur per-minute
| charges on their phone lines, and after 1997 or so, could buy
| heavily subsidized lines from startup competitive telephone
| companies (who in turn typically WERE collecting a per-minute
| charge when the end users called into those lines from the
| legacy local telephone company.) Once an ISP got big enough
| they could connect to the SS7 network and buy inter machine
| trunks. Those did have per-minute costs, and very high startup
| costs, but they were so cheap compared to even the subsidized
| T1/PRI prices it didn't really matter.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "Software modem" resource:
| https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/Softwar...
| dep_b wrote:
| When I worked at an Internet Helpdesk I routinely "downgraded"
| V90 modems to V34 using AT+MS=V34 or AT+MS=11. Would connect much
| quicker, more stable and the effective speed was exactly the
| same.
|
| V90 was really stretching the audible phone spectrum to the max
| and any type of analog disruption would render it effectively
| useless.
| ceautery wrote:
| Modem manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place back
| then. It was already expensive to have hardware chips that
| supported every available connection protocol, and the extra
| horsepower you needed to support, say, BTLZ error correction had
| to come from somewhere. So either add more hardware to the modem,
| or offload that work to the slow computer CPUs of the late 90s
| (when Winmodems first came out) which weren't up for the task.
|
| I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The
| best I could do for my users then was to configure their init
| strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I
| forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error
| correction.
|
| Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute
| phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem
| before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| He got banned several months later. Difficult to see why (maybe
| posts removed)? But a lot of people used "password" or whatever
| as their password in 2001, so not unusual to see old accounts
| axed.
| aaronkjones wrote:
| My first job was with a local, rural ISP in 2001. I convinced the
| boss to let me have an additional account and I payed for a
| second phone line. Initially I used some software (on Windows
| 2000) to perform modem bonding (shotgun modem) with two modems.
| Then, eventually upgraded to Diamond Supra Sonic II 112k. It of
| course never reached 112k obviously but I was riding that high
| for quite a while.
| sonar_un wrote:
| I still remember the modem string that I always used.
|
| AT &F &C1 &D2 &Q5 &K0 S46=0
| exabrial wrote:
| I think I got an actual 56k connection once, felt like a
| millionaire.
|
| 38.4k about 70% of the time, and 28k 20% or 14.4 the remaining
| 10%.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| And Flex vs. X2 before V.90.
| keithnz wrote:
| I used to dial up to a vax in terminal mode circa 1991 with a
| 2400 baud modem. But sometimes it would connect at 300.... which
| was painful. Not to mention there was only limited lines in so it
| could take a while to get a connection, so even if you did
| connect at 300, you'd often just put up with it.
|
| Was a cool time, no one really knew anything about the internet
| then and it felt like this awesome "secret world" that connected
| you to the rest of the world!
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