Me too! Although I did web hosting and company ISDN lines and not dialup 1996-1998.
Used Windows NT for web hosting and Slackware Linux with qmail for mail hosting. Sold out at what I thought was the top - which was a year or two too early but that's OK.
We did our billing with great plains accounting software which still exists as Microsoft Dynamics GP.
When 56k came around you had to do ISDN, but for many rural ISPs the tariffs for ISDN was cost prohibitive so POTS was the only option.
I worked for a few ISPs and negotiated telcos to bring in redundant OC12s to support the need, allowing them to use our data centers for the local switching. We never needed that capacity ourselves, but as it was before they started using multiple colors per fiber that was the smallest they would run.
I also started out with stacks of external modems and NT RAS.
I remember that the plastic on stacked modems would blacken due to heat in about 6 months.
I dealt with sendmail, bind, etc and didn't do the account provisioning but it was written in Delphi.
As I had written an entire 7 digit double entry accounting system in college in two weeks backed by dbase, this stories excel and paper based system seems like an anomaly for the time.
NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support.
While I did introduce Linux, we were mostly on DEC Alphastations because you could support a lot more load for less money than the sun boxes at the time.
It was a fun time. I remember hopping on #nanog on irc because I couldn't get uunet support to pull routs from us and had them pulling from us in less than an hour.
> NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support.
I don't remember the details, but at the micro-ISP I worked at, I got frontpage extensions working on Apache for customers.
We had two T1s, one for upstream, one for modems (which I never got to play with), we also contracted out nationwide dialup through megapath? or someone... We ran a radius auth server and they did the rest. Some java accounting package; I did an integration for ach billing, and made a module so we could sell domains (via Tucows OpenSRS). At some point, the modem T1 stopped working and we couldn't get the telco to fix it, so we had to move all the customers to the outsourced dialup provider, which wasn't great for the business... I left because of scheduling/poor performance at school and they got purchased by a customer.
Used Windows NT for web hosting and Slackware Linux with qmail for mail hosting. Sold out at what I thought was the top - which was a year or two too early but that's OK.