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.
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!
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!
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body)
You probably sounded like a generic adult woman at that age. Much younger, and your physical size keeps you from having the same resonance as an adult; much older, and your voice has started cracking.
But when I was 11 or 12, I could order pizza delivery, and they would always close with "Thanks for your order, Mrs. Devilbunny". Never got shunted off to the "I need to speak with an adult in the home to place this order" line.
It was kinda neat, although I never really thought of ways I could exploit it. (I wasn't devious enough at the time.) And then when I got devious enough, I had to wait two or three more years until the cracking stopped completely and I could be believed as an adult again.
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,
I feel you. Near the end of my mom's life there were a few years where I was on basically 24/7 phone alert in case she was rushed to the hospital again, etc. I was never really able to use vibrating alerts again after that. I just associate them with that stressful time.
For different but similar reasons I get anxiety spikes from Slack notification noises. Can't handle 'em.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I was also doing dialup internet support around that time. Talking a senior citizen through setting up a dial up networking connection on Windows 95/98 using a winmodem on a line which was obviously noisy with no way to see what was on their screen was pretty common.
I remember one time I'd gotten the connection established and they said "now what?", and I said "You've connected to the Internet" and they said "so what do I do now?" They'd gone out and bought the internet package because it was the thing to do, but had no idea what to do with it. I ended up showing them how to go to Google which had only just been released that month.
And I definitely relate to being adverse to hearing a ringing phone
That is an amazing story. And you know that because of you, that person probably still calls their browser “the internet” because you showed them how to get to google.
I can’t imagine any old person calling tech support now and getting that kind of help. But think about how many people got their very first exposure to the internet just before you hung up the phone. Crazy.
I was thankfully out of the ISP business before the Winmodems hit. But the many... agonising... hours... spent doing support sometimes with the same person to get people online is something I'll never forget. We had someone who'd call back every few weeks because he had "optimized" (broken beyond belief) his winsock configuration in new and inventive ways that makes me think he was most likely doing it on purpose for social contact.
Every time it'd take an hour or more, because you'd tell him to do X, ask him to confirm he'd done X, ask him if he was sure he'd done X, then have him try to go online, and he'd call back and it'd turn out he'd done Y because he "thought it'd work better".
Also, the sheer number of times people who'd get too trigger-happy and start trying to connect before they'd hung up...
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.
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.
Click on start. Yeah that’s in the bottom left. Yup that one. Then look for settings. No the word settings. Has a little arrow next to it. Yeah hit that. It didn’t do anything? Wait, click with the mouse button on the left. Yeah it brought up a little menu to the right? That’s good. Now look for… ok let’s start over and remember not to click anywhere besides where I tell you to. And keep the mouse where it is. Ok find the start button again. No its in the bottom left of your screen…
Same here. With call forwarding our 24/7 support usually rang at my house. Night was the 'drunk shift' and usually login problems. One user was particularly edgy about his password and would not say it even to me, they were stored as crypts, so I could reset it. He said he had pasted it from another place (which probably means he forgot it and was too arrogant to admit it) Round and round until I checked the logs and he was trying to sign on with a pw of '********' which is how it had gone into the clipboard. Instead of engaging with him further I set his pw to that. Problem solved.
My greatest win was to add a few lines to our RADIUS server to flip case one time on bad logins, so if 'mYpASSWORD123' failed it would try 'MyPassword123' and let them in if it worked. Logs showed thousands of fixed logins per month and reduced tech support calls to less than a third. We declared victory over CAPSLOCK.
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.
“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.
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!
> “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.
Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
The amount of time that pace kept up was also impressive, lasting well into the 2000s.
One of the first computers that was mine (as opposed to being a family computer) was a summer 2000 iMac DV with a 400Mhz PPC G3, 10GB HD, 128MB RAM, and 15” 1024x768 CRT. When I upgraded to a new iMac in 2005, it had a 2Ghz PPC G5, 500GB HD, 2GB of RAM, and a 20” 1680x1050 LCD.
That’s a ridiculously huge jump for just 5 years’ time. I can’t imagine where things would be now if that rate of advancement had continued through to today.
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.
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).
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
at a consumer level, the only people that ever
knew or cared were people trying to run linux
or a bsd
Lots of tech support stories in the HN replies here, and the linked Anandtech discussion, that contradict that.
Yeah, winmodems were "good enough" for most. But tended to perform worse with noisy phone lines. Which were really common. Which is what the linked article talks about.
Also remember that DOS online gaming was a thing for a few years. If you played Quake online in the early days, you were generally not doing it through Windows.
Also I think Warcraft and all them were dos. Battle net? Kali? I dunno, that was my friend's department.
They were called WinModems at the time because they worked via a driver that required Windows to run. I think Linux eventually gained support for some of them, but at the time it was Windows or fuck you. Which I felt personally insulted by, as a modem of all things should work with any OS that could speak RS232 (which was all of them).
Because of that, and because of the added CPU burden, when my 28.8kbps modem went on the fritz I bought an external ZOOM 56kbps modem as a replacement. All the internal modems available at the time were Winmodems.
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.
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.
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.
This is true, but Windows and Mac prioritize this well at the OS level. I've been using mostly USB sound devices for the last ~15 years including gaming and never any skipping or desync issues. Not sure about Linux, I have not used it as a daily driver.
People just expect things to be integrated. Even Wi-Fi is, although it's probably typically an M.2 card. I have a <2000 computer that had both integrated audio and video, and it's kind-of become a norm.
Integrated sound cards are way more susceptive to interference, though, and the quality suffers a bit. They're merely good enough.
Also, people generally seem to use USB sound cards, as it removes even more room for interference (though my ASUS Xonar Essence STX sounds great already, unlike the integrated solution that transfers power rail and other noise).
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.
On Windows, yes. On Linux, the proprietary driver was OK (consistently connecting at 48kbps and keeping it for hours), except for the micro-freeze when going off-hook.
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!
It also felt so much different to use a computer. Like, even my computers in 1996-97-98 felt like a different sort of beast. The software was very self-contained, and even as late as 2000 you could use a computer exclusively offline and never really feel like you were missing much.
Like, encyclopedias came on CDs (sometimes a pack of CDs lol. I remember having colliers in a 4-disc set). Games had great single player modes and local lan options - and didn't require an internet connection to play. There were lots of simple little toy programs and games, too. None of it required internet connections.
In a way that permanence was nice. If you pull out a 90s computer and load it up with 90s games, you still get the exact same experience you did back then. I think that's part of the appeal of people collecting vintage computers - I even seen teenagers enjoying that these days lol.
But yea, connecting to the internet felt a little like a ritual and the content felt like it had so much more flavor.
Like, people writing silly things on a geocities/angelfire/members.aol site, joining a webring, creating pages with tacky backgrounds and flashing gif accents. It was more fun to find out what funny fantasy world AquaHorse1998 was writing about on their angelfire site, than to see boring pictures of a dog on Facebook that Jenny from Ohio posted. (And it's the same person lol)
Its somewhat telling that as much as we like to reminisce about the early internet, none of us actually use the parts of the internet that emulate that era.
The internet now is better by just about every metric. Its just not the internet of our teenage years, so like geezers in perpetuity back to the beginning of time we Luke things better how they were when we were teenagers, even if reality doesn't agree with those fond memories.
In the mid 80s I used to pay $6.25 an hour (plus phone fees, which ran hundreds of dollars a month for calls to a local number) to connect to Compuserve at 300 baud!
I remember those days but not the actual costs because I wasn't paying the bills! There were a few occasional months where I was in pretty big trouble for dialing up long distance BBSs or being on the local BBS for too long and racking up exorbitant phone bills.
A few years back I was telling a guy I payed $300 for like a 250MB drive and thought I will never need another drive again, I'll never run out of room again.
The guy then told me that he payed $800 for a 2400 baud modem.....
The very first modem I ever owned had a max speed of 300 baud. It was one of those Bell modems with the rubber cups you inserted the handset of the phone into.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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
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!
> 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 .
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.
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. :)
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.
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>.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
X2 had just come out, and AOL (among others) had been advertising the new connection speeds. Didn't do me much good with my external 9600 baud modem.
My mother has a friend who was an engineer at US Robotics at that time. I must've been 11 or 12. I told him how I loved going online, and he found out about my ancient modem, and said he was going to send me an upgrade.
I was expecting a used 28.8 or even 14.4, but a few weeks go by and package comes. I come home from school and a shrink wrapped 56k X2 Sportster is sitting on my counter.
The difference was incredible. Connecting at 5x the speeds I used to get was life changing. I used that modem for at least seven years before broadband came along.
DSL and Cable were available at my house in 1999, but I didn't get broadband until 2003. The $49.95/mo was just too expensive. (Compared to the $10/mo for dialup)
LOL, I did pretty much the same thing, just not for as long. I remember it took about a day after I had it installed that suddenly every house I was looking to buy "had to have @Home service" (there wasn't another provider where I was looking). I can't remember how long it took before it became a mild crisis when internet service was out.
Amazing how far things have come. I work at home, now. Late into the COVID lockdown, the $120/mo Business internet service that hasn't gone down since it was installed (like ten years ago?)[0], was intermittently down for a week, with some periods exceeding 24-hours[1]. I was already at a permanent remote work gig and though I could still write code, there were certain things that were impossible being unable to connect to anything.
I'm a cord cutter and this was COVID lock-down so nothing was open. With no internet/YouTube/TikTok/Snapchat/etc/etc/etc ... you'd think we were living under candle-light boiling water for a bath the way the kids were behaving (insult to injury, it was freezing outside, their mobile service was awful in the house so they were dry).
Seriously, though, there were moments during that week that I was like ... "so what now ... early bedtime?"
[0] Technically it went down once, shortly after install, when the service provider I had left had cut the wrong line while terminating my service. To my new provider's credit, they send someone out an hour after I called -- at 5:30 PM -- and fixed it without charge. They'd charge now, but everything goes downhill ...
[1] The reason I pay for the Business service is this reliability. I was told "when there's maintenance, they send an e-mail and it's late/over the weekend." My neighbors have lost service several times when I've been fine. There's "no guarantee service will always work" but the outage was caused by the provider botching a Gigabit upgrade that was supposed to be short/weekend/evening, customers were never notified about and ended up being a prolonged outage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
Man seeing everyone's dialup nightmares I guess I should be satisfied by the quality of my local analog POTS Provider in the 1990s/2000s. I rarely connected at slower than advertised speeds. I would dial out and 99% of the time I would find it connected at 53K, even on a winmodem.
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
I never had to deal with winmodems either as an owner or a tech person, thank heavens. I started out with the 300-baud Commodore 64 modem, but I knew a couple of Pacific Northwest Bell techs who pretty quickly set me up with a 1200 baud modem, which was extremely high tech at the time. It didn't have a dialer, so I had a separate phone attached to it I used to dial, but at least I didn't have to use acoustic cups!
The scariest thing at the time for those of us with one phone line only, was mom getting a call just after we finally convinced someone to share a rare track on Napster.
The house wasn't that old but was old enough that the wiring was abysmal. You could easily understand conversations happening on one phone line from the other line. When someone was on the other line, I'd get a re-negotiate and sometimes drop to 21.6k (a reliable minimum just before I had broadband installed).
Those things were returned like crazy when I worked at CompUSA. I had never met a customer who had made one connect at 56K[0] and none of the staff -- all serious computer-nerds who spent much of their income at the store -- could get a 56K connection to anything.
I believe, also, that 33.6K is the speed you will get when you are connecting to another modem (ala a typical BBS). I'm foggy on the details, but my understanding is that to negotiate 56K, the other end of the conversation has to be digital[1].
[0] Admittedly, I quit before I had broadband and 56K was relatively new; maybe it got better, but I stopped paying attention.
[1] I did work in telecom, so I am cringing a little because I know that -- at a minimum -- that's a somewhat ridiculous over-simplification of several different things that I had regular, though casual, exposure to way too long ago to speak intelligently about, now.
Not fond memories of the early days of the internet (and to a greater extent, BBSes ... YModem-G FTW).
When I saw the title, I knew the real title was "Should I replace my 56K WinModem with the 28.8k U.S. Robotics modem that I used previously"
I ran a BBS in the early 90s back when my income was "whatever Mom would give me." When it came time to get my first job, I figured "CompUSA has an employee discount, I'm working there." The first serious purchase I made was a USR 16.8k modem to let me move my aging 9600 baud external to a second BBS node[0]. Employee discount was "at cost" which for a hot item like that, which was being sold at MAP price[1], meant it was like $5 less.
However, US Robotics occasionally sent a company rep[2] who informed me that I could get one for like $120 by filling out a form and sending some proof that "I sold four(?) of them" (I think receipt numbers/printed copes was it). There were limits, but I owned two of them, eventually their best 28.8k (I think it was something like $450 retail at the time).
Back then it was "US Robotics", "Sort-of-Hayes", "Zoom or Zoom Knockoff" with the last one meaning nothing but grief. IIRC, the "Zoom Modem" was the first form of what was later just called "WinModems" -- modems with minimal hardware, implemented entirely in drivers, heavily reliant on the CPU for handling the work. It wasn't that the modems broke/failed/were unreliable hardware-wise. The quality of those software drivers was abysmal. The overhead was too high for 90s PCs. They regularly connected well below their advertised rates. They were Plug/Play "jumperless" (sort of plug/play) ISA cards. Meanwhile, you plugged your USR into your serial port. If you had two, you got a serial port card with 16550 UART chip and Bob's your Uncle.
Had this person asked me, at the time, I would have said "I don't know anyone who successfully negotiates a 56K connection to anything" and "Stick with the USR; at least you'll disconnect less."
I never ended up bothering with 56K. Our wiring was pre-modem and there was something related to our actual service (distance to the CO, like DSL?) that meant we couldn't support the speed, anyway. Nothing but the US Robotics modems performed above 16.8k and even the USR stumbled to 24K occasionally.
[0] From memory, and I'm sure I have bits wrong: USR released a 16.8k one at that speed earlier than everyone else before a standard was in place. I bought after they released one that had both standards
[1] Same memory issue as above: I was told this was "the minimum we were allowed to advertise a product at. Basically, the manufacturer pays for advertising space in the retailer's circular, and in return the retailer agrees not to advertise a price beneath what the manufacturer dictates. There were other requirements (such as not selling things before release dates, etc) and we could turn around and sell it at 20% off if all day if we wanted to, but couldn't advertise a lower price (so everyone sold Windows 95 for I think, $45). It's a workaround the typical laws that prohibit a distributor from setting retail prices.
[2] I learned later (at least at the retail stores) these were often people paid by a third-party that supplied swag and a small manual, sometimes "one-time gig" paid cash, usually paid for not by the company but through a staffing company paid for via some marketing company. Or maybe that was just me, the very part-time Fuji rep where I spent most of my time hitting on the Intel girl and scoring Pentium keychains (the ones with the dead Pentiums in them -- still have a few) and those weird dolls that were based on their clean-room staff outfits.
