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Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001)
- fnordpiglet 3y agoAT+MS=V34,1,2400,28800,2400,28800
- keithnz 3y agoI used to dial up to a vax in terminal mode circa 1991 with a 2400 baud modem. But sometimes it would connect at 300.... which was painful. Not to mention there was only limited lines in so it could take a while to get a connection, so even if you did connect at 300, you'd often just put up with it. 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!
- cwbriscoe 3y agoMy first modem was 300 baud on my Commodore 64 as a kid. 56k was like heaven a few years later.
- mmazing 3y ago> 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.
- doublepg23 3y agoThere's still websites like Agora Road that have an old internet feel, you just have to put work in.
- idiotsecant 3y agoIts somewhat telling that as much as we like to reminisce about the early internet, none of us actually use the parts of the internet that emulate that era. 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.
- pasquinelli 3y agowe're actually just too addicted to the internet of today to spend any time in the throwback internet.
- WWLink 3y agoIt also felt so much different to use a computer. Like, even my computers in 1996-97-98 felt like a different sort of beast. The software was very self-contained, and even as late as 2000 you could use a computer exclusively offline and never really feel like you were missing much. 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)
- ChumpGPT 3y agoA few years back I was telling a guy I payed $300 for like a 250MB drive and thought I will never need another drive again, I'll never run out of room again. The guy then told me that he payed $800 for a 2400 baud modem.....
- StanislavPetrov 3y agoIn the mid 80s I used to pay $6.25 an hour (plus phone fees, which ran hundreds of dollars a month for calls to a local number) to connect to Compuserve at 300 baud!
- illegalsmile 3y agoI remember those days but not the actual costs because I wasn't paying the bills! There were a few occasional months where I was in pretty big trouble for dialing up long distance BBSs or being on the local BBS for too long and racking up exorbitant phone bills.
- JohnFen 3y ago> But sometimes it would connect at 300 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.
- josuepeq 3y agoMan seeing everyone's dialup nightmares I guess I should be satisfied by the quality of my local analog POTS Provider in the 1990s/2000s. I rarely connected at slower than advertised speeds. I would dial out and 99% of the time I would find it connected at 53K, even on a winmodem.
- yyyk 3y agoThese comments are not complete without recalling the sound of modems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckc6XSSh52w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckc6XSSh52w
- aledalgrande 3y agoThe scariest thing at the time for those of us with one phone line only, was mom getting a call just after we finally convinced someone to share a rare track on Napster.
- pimlottc 3y agoThat's why you always dial *70 first!
- donatj 3y agoI remember switching from an internal 56k to an external 33.6k because it made my Internet way more solid.
- mdip 3y agoI couldn't even get 33.6k to work on my wiring. 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.
- mdip 3y agoNot fond memories of the early days of the internet (and to a greater extent, BBSes ... YModem-G FTW). 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.
- panzagl 3y ago+++
- themadturk 3y agoI never had to deal with winmodems either as an owner or a tech person, thank heavens. I started out with the 300-baud Commodore 64 modem, but I knew a couple of Pacific Northwest Bell techs who pretty quickly set me up with a 1200 baud modem, which was extremely high tech at the time. It didn't have a dialer, so I had a separate phone attached to it I used to dial, but at least I didn't have to use acoustic cups!
- saithound 3y agoTitle should say (2001). Although it's evidently funnier this way.
- RuggedPineapple 3y agoIn 2000 or 2001 I ended up having to crash at my high school one night. Rehearsal had gone late, till 11 or midnight, and I was stuck. Not that big of a deal, the drama department had everything I needed. Showers, beds, clothes. It was fine. They also had a couple computers to control lights and sound stuff, but they weren't connected to the internet. No worries I thought, I know all my family's dial up info, I can log in via that. So I did. I was a little perplexed that it came in under speed (56k modem, but I was only able to get a 28k or 22k baud connection. I forget exactly but it was somewhere in that range). I was curious enough that I asked around with the IT staff the next day and got confused stares all around, apparently with the types of phone lines the school had a dial up connection shouldn't have been possible AT ALL. This was some sort of big deal to the point they even had to follow up with their telephone provider and there was some question about if they were bilking the school out of paying for a certain kind of connection but delivering something else. I was obviously cut out of the loop at that point but it led to some high drama behind the scenes.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI’m not sure I follow. The service was better than expected? 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?
- bityard 3y agoMy guess is the IT "department" didn't know the difference between dialup and ISDN.
- Moto7451 3y agoAt least in the schools I did volunteer tech support in the early 00s (in LA, while I was in Middle and High School), the phones in the classrooms were meant to dial into the school’s own switchboard and not to the outside world. Maybe that was possible? My supervising teachers always seemed to walk to the central office to make calls they didn’t want to use their 300 cell phone minutes on (remember that fun?). 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.
- jeffrallen 3y agoDefinitely, dude. You were much more likely to get a stable and reliable connection from a hardware modem at a slower speed than from a soft modem that was trying for 56 kbits on a bad voice line. 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.
- retrac 3y agoChannel capacity is b * log2 (1 + snr) where b is the bandwidth in Hz and snr is the linear signal-to-noise ratio. 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.
- pixl97 3y agoHeh, where I lived 56k modems were useless. The telephone infrastructure was already using some kind of cheat where they effectively doubled up the number of voice calls that went over a single wire (and I can't for the life of me remember what this is called now). The most you could ever get would be 28.8, but more likely you'd get 24,000.
- don-code 3y agoYou're probably thinking of robbed bit signaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed_bit_signaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed_bit_signaling 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.
- marcus0x62 3y agoRobbed bit signaling was (is) used to encode signaling information on a digital circuit (typically a T1 in North America) without a dedicated signaling channel. There were a variety of multiplexing systems to get more than a single line on a copper pair, but they didn't have anything to do with robbed bit signaling.
- zzzcsgo 3y agoThose winmodems... Had a lot of issues with them, specially under Linux. I tried to avoid them like the plague.
- underseacables 3y agoWhen I was 14 there was a power outage at Barnes & Noble. That's how I got my 28.8 modem.
- ksherlock 3y agoFor 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.
- wkat4242 3y agoIt also made your PC slow and crappy in general and they didn't work with real OSes. And they would often fail or crap out when you were doing something else (most windows was still DOS based and not fully multitasking back in those days) Yuck. Bottom of the barrel stuff.
- bitwize 3y agoThey were called WinModems at the time because they worked via a driver that required Windows to run. I think Linux eventually gained support for some of them, but at the time it was Windows or fuck you. Which I felt personally insulted by, as a modem of all things should work with any OS that could speak RS232 (which was all of them). 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.
- doubloon 3y agofurther radicalizing the open source movement. this was a massive deal with linux people back then since it threatened to shut linux off the internet, which would kill it. (if you take the idea to the extreme as young people do, that every network hardware device would soon require single-source proprietary software from a monopolistic corporation).
- rascul 3y agoOld, surprised it's still up, and related: http://www.linmodems.org/ http://www.linmodems.org/
- throitallaway 3y ago
- MichaelRo 3y agoI never had a modem. In 2000 I was attending University living in a student hostel which had Internet by grace of allocated state budget. It was horrifyingly slow. No idea what the original connection was, but distributed through coaxial cable Ethernet to hundreds of students rooms, it was barely usable. Also I had no idea what I was doing, porn was one thing if by that you understand navigating webrings on Altavista and leaving one image to download overnight hoping by morning at least it starts to show something. First time I saw real Internet on my first job in 2001, a satellite downlink connection at 256 Kbit/sec (uplink was a regular modem), I couldn't believe such speed was possible. 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.
- mkoryak 3y agoAh this brings back some memories.. I forgot all about having to connect to the Internet every day and how I could tell by the sounds the modulator demodulator made if the connection was going to succeed
- tomhoward 3y agoMy first full time job was doing phone tech support for dialup internet users for one of Australia's biggest ISPs in the late 90s. Many of the customers who'd call had just bought a new big-brand desktop PC (most commonly a HP Pavillion) with a winmodem in it, and so our job was to get it to work, even if their phone line was bad, or had other devices (fax machines, alarms, wireless phones) causing interference. We became very very familiar with the AT command sets to adjust the settings on all the different modem models, and with winmodems you'd often just have to slow it right down to 33k, 28k or even less.
- bbarn 3y agoMan, this brings back memories - but I'm a little surprised 2001 is appended to the title. In the mid-90's I got my first 56K modem and expected a world of faster connections only to realize every BBS I was on didn't support it anyway. By 2001 I think I had cable service, and most people in my area could get it (suburb of Chicago at the time)
- ac29 3y ago56k wasnt standardized until 2000, though the draft was available a little earlier. There was also the very short lived K56flex and X2 technologies that came out in 1997, but ISP support and sales were pretty low.
- RulerOf 3y agoX2 had just come out, and AOL (among others) had been advertising the new connection speeds. Didn't do me much good with my external 9600 baud modem. 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.
- marcus0x62 3y agoIt would have been difficult (expensive) for a BBS to support 56k. The calling side modem could be on an analog POTS line, but the called side needed a digital circuit, usually a PRI (T1 with ISDN signaling.) It was far easier for them to support 64/128kbps ISDN -- all they needed was one or more dual-channel BRI lines.
- icehawk 3y agoDSL and Cable were available at my house in 1999, but I didn't get broadband until 2003. The $49.95/mo was just too expensive. (Compared to the $10/mo for dialup)
- throw555chip 3y agoIt's not related I guess but I remember connecting to CompuServe in 1983 with a 300 Baud modem to catch up on the digital world.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoAcoustic coupler or bust! At 110 baud if you're not in a hurry, or using a teletype with paper instead of a screen. (Never used one, but saw them.)
- anotheruser13 3y agoWhen I was in college umpty-foo years ago, I worked part-time at a timesharing firm that had 300 baud acoustic couplers and used APL. Years later, I worked around the corner from the USRobotics factory in Skokie, IL, where they made PalmPilots and Courier modems. Good times!
- andix 3y agoIf I remember correctly back then in the US local phone calls and also dial up wasn't charged per minute. What a heavenly place, we had to pay around 2$ per hour, which added up a lot if you wanted to go online for 2 hours every day. 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.
- Scoundreller 3y agoMy big bad national ISP used the same PPPoE authentication for dialup and DSL. So you could buy an unlimited dialup account and use those hours on DSL and chew through as much data as you wanted. Later on, some independent ISPs sold logins+passwords that you could use over the "Bell" DSL service and connect through them for unlim data. (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...)
- marcus0x62 3y agoISPs in the US initially used unmetered access to compete against legacy services like Compuserv that charged per-minute. It also helped that they didn't typically incur per-minute charges on their phone lines, and after 1997 or so, could buy heavily subsidized lines from startup competitive telephone companies (who in turn typically WERE collecting a per-minute charge when the end users called into those lines from the legacy local telephone company.) Once an ISP got big enough they could connect to the SS7 network and buy inter machine trunks. Those did have per-minute costs, and very high startup costs, but they were so cheap compared to even the subsidized T1/PRI prices it didn't really matter.
- h2odragon 3y ago"Software modem" resource: https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/Software_Modems https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/Softwar...
- dep_b 3y agoWhen I worked at an Internet Helpdesk I routinely "downgraded" V90 modems to V34 using AT+MS=V34 or AT+MS=11. Would connect much quicker, more stable and the effective speed was exactly the same. V90 was really stretching the audible phone spectrum to the max and any type of analog disruption would render it effectively useless.
- ceautery 3y agoModem manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place back then. It was already expensive to have hardware chips that supported every available connection protocol, and the extra horsepower you needed to support, say, BTLZ error correction had to come from somewhere. So either add more hardware to the modem, or offload that work to the slow computer CPUs of the late 90s (when Winmodems first came out) which weren't up for the task. 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.
- Scoundreller 3y agoHe got banned several months later. Difficult to see why (maybe posts removed)? But a lot of people used "password" or whatever as their password in 2001, so not unusual to see old accounts axed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aaronkjones 3y agoMy first job was with a local, rural ISP in 2001. I convinced the boss to let me have an additional account and I payed for a second phone line. Initially I used some software (on Windows 2000) to perform modem bonding (shotgun modem) with two modems. Then, eventually upgraded to Diamond Supra Sonic II 112k. It of course never reached 112k obviously but I was riding that high for quite a while.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sonar_un 3y agoI still remember the modem string that I always used. AT &F &C1 &D2 &Q5 &K0 S46=0
- hoherd 3y agoS11=50
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- exabrial 3y agoI think I got an actual 56k connection once, felt like a millionaire. 38.4k about 70% of the time, and 28k 20% or 14.4 the remaining 10%.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoAnd Flex vs. X2 before V.90.