Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001)
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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.
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.
I still have mp3s with botched (and very audible) grabled parts, corrupted at downdload.
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.
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).
Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever take for granted!
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.
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.
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 think I still have that (paper) list in my (physical) files somewhere...
These days, I keep a similar list for routers that I can replace the OS on.
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!
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?
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.
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
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,
For different but similar reasons I get anxiety spikes from Slack notification noises. Can't handle 'em.
*wave of nostalgia*
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
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.
They often came with nice (Dell rebranded) Trinitron monitors although I think that was usually an upgrade over some base monitor.
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
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.
LT Win Modem.
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.
Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud.
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.
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!
I really miss that feeling, it's a rarity nowadays.
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.
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)
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.
Yes, I'm old.
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.
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.
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.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.
https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dia...
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?
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.
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.
Now I’m curious to see what baud rate can be achieved over today’s VOIP lines!
Not sure if it linked at 9600 or what, didn't pay attention.
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 .
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
By 2001 I think I had cable service, and most people in my area could get it (suburb of Chicago at the time)
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.
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.
AT &F &C1 &D2 &Q5 &K0 S46=0
At 110 baud if you're not in a hurry, or using a teletype with paper instead of a screen.
(Never used one, but saw them.)
Years later, I worked around the corner from the USRobotics factory in Skokie, IL, where they made PalmPilots and Courier modems. Good times!
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.
(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...)
V90 was really stretching the audible phone spectrum to the max and any type of analog disruption would render it effectively useless.
38.4k about 70% of the time, and 28k 20% or 14.4 the remaining 10%.
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.
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.