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Comment by chriscjcj | Hacker News Reader

I was never able to exceed 24kb/s with my "56k" modem. I came to find out that the phone company (in Austin TX) was using a single pair to service more than one customer in my apartment complex. Naturally, whatever piece of equipment they used to accomplish this stymied faster modem speeds.

I finally installed an ISDN. That was delightful. Not only did it allow me to have two lines - one for voice and one for data - the netgear RT-338 ISDN router automatically dialed my ISP instantaneously. It felt like I was always connected because I didn't have to wait for a modem handshake. Speeds were more than twice as fast as what I could get with my analog modem. However, by far the MOST IMPORTANT thing (and mostly the reason I installed the ISDN in the first place) is that my latency took a nosedive allowing me to become an LPB with a 50ms ping time on QuakeWorld. >:-D

(Shoutout to Charlie S. from OuterNet, Austin's best ISP in the 90's)

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I worked on ISDN drivers and firmware at a job back in the late 1990s. One of the optimizations I implemented eliminated a memory copy by the 68302 which improved ping times from ~30ms to ~16ms. The good old 68000 is not exactly the fastest at memory copies...

Seems like an oversight that the extra stuff the 68302 added wouldn't have been a DMA block copy or something.

I am, no doubt, a beneficiary of your work. You have my sincere gratitude! :-)

You likely had something called a 'pair gain' installed - which worked much like DSL, by using a high frequency FM carrier over the audio frequencies to provide a second phone line on the same pair. These things were largely gone by the mid 90's - and were not that common in the first place.

They plagued Australian homes up through the late 2000's unfortunately

Fucking Telstra

Yup, we built a new house in Australia in 2001 and thought we were being so forward thinking by getting a 2nd phone line for the modem/fax. Of course it ended up being done using a pair gain and we were stuck at 33.6k.

Back in the late 90s friend had ISDN installed at his apartment and it was glorious. Compared to dialup it was like high speed internet. We used some Mac app that basically gave you access to all the cracked software you could have ever wanted.

> some Mac app

Hotline? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

You could also bond the two channels together for a 128K connection - installed Linux to get the bonding to work on my ISDN card as Windows 3.1 For Workgroups knew nothing about it.

What is an LPB?

Low Ping Bastard

Back in the day LPB was someone with low pings (remember dial up was 150 to 300ms sometimes) and they'd have an upper hand on games before they were "unlagged" with prediction code.

A common lament among the dead 15 years ago in real time online gaming...low ping bastard/bitch, basically just saying the only reason you got the kill is because your ping is 60ms and mine is 250ms.

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