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Comment by dicriseg | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf

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.

> 16550A UART

*wave of nostalgia*

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).

> a savvy consumer needed to keep a whitelist of "real modem" make and model numbers with them going to the store.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

There needs to be a special kind of therapist for people like us.

I remember stepping people thru reinstalling DUN so many times I could probably still do it in my sleep to this day.

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.

Winmodems were a serious plague for everybody (except modem manufacturers).

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