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Comment by giraffe333 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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