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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud.
LT Win Modem.