7 ms·

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 an

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.

wkat4242 3y ago
It 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 ago
They 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 ago
further 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 ago
  Old, surprised it's still up, and related: http://www.linmodems.org/ http://www.linmodems.org/
  - throitallaway 3y ago
    Holy heck, I remember using that. I'm so glad that the days of IRQ conflicts, Winmodems, etc. are past us.
netsharc 3y ago
I wonder how it is nowadays, PCI(e) sound cards are no longer a thing and are mostly on the motherboard (ok well the on-board chips are probably more powerful than chips on sound cards from x years ago), AMD's on-CPU GPU are quite powerful too. My network card^W chip has an option to off-load checksum calculations. 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.
- premysl 3y ago
  People just expect things to be integrated. Even Wi-Fi is, although it's probably typically an M.2 card. I have a <2000 computer that had both integrated audio and video, and it's kind-of become a norm. 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).
- giantrobot 3y ago
  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. 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.
  - JohnBooty 3y ago
    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. This is true, but Windows and Mac prioritize this well at the OS level. I've been using mostly USB sound devices for the last ~15 years including gaming and never any skipping or desync issues. Not sure about Linux, I have not used it as a daily driver.
dicriseg 3y ago
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!
- axpvms 3y ago
  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
  - dicriseg 3y ago
    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.
- vidarh 3y ago
  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...
jwells89 3y ago
“Winmodem” brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had its hard drive fail. 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.
- comprev 3y ago
  For me it brings back great memories of the first PC my folks bought for the family home where they asked _me_ what spec I'd like (Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 30GB disk, 17" CRT, Soundblaster Live! 5.1, Creative Labs 5.1 speakers). One might say it was the catalyst to what became my career - and love of gaming!
- WWLink 3y ago
  > “Winmodem” brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had its hard drive fail. Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    The amount of time that pace kept up was also impressive, lasting well into the 2000s. 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.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
chrsig 3y ago
freeing cpu/ram generally wasn't the motivator to get a hardware modem. winmodems required drivers that generally were only available for windows ("win"modem) 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.
- bhumihang 3y ago
  [flagged]
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  at a consumer level, the only people that ever knew or cared were people trying to run linux or a bsd Lots of tech support stories in the HN replies here, and the linked Anandtech discussion, that contradict that. 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.
- abirch 3y ago
  That's how I learned about the kernel and modules. That and getting a CD ROM to work.
dehrmann 3y ago
I just remember winmodem drivers always being finicky and rarely working.
- patrakov 3y ago
  On Windows, yes. On Linux, the proprietary driver was OK (consistently connecting at 48kbps and keeping it for hours), except for the micro-freeze when going off-hook. LT Win Modem.
comprev 3y ago
Buying an external US Robotics 56k modem allowed me to get online with RedHat 8 (boxset purchased from Amazon, IIRC), as the PC I had contained a PCI Win-modem with no compatible Linux drivers. It was a friend at school who introduced me to Linux. Surfing the web at home on Linux in the early 00s felt like I was in niche club :-)
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Back in the day, Central Computer carried packaged RedHat and clear vinyl Slackware CD sets. One of the few brick and mortar computer and software store regional chains that still exist in the US, the other being MicroCenter. https://centralcomputer.com https://centralcomputer.com https://www.microcenter.com https://www.microcenter.com 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.
  - arglebargle123 3y ago
    That's a name I haven't heard for a very long time. Central Computer was a fantastic shop.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Stratoscope 3y ago
      They are still in business, with five stores! https://www.centralcomputer.com/ https://www.centralcomputer.com/
1letterunixname 3y ago
Yep. Softmodems were hot garbage because they were generally Windows only. Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud.

wkat4242 3y ago

It 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 ago

They 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 ago

further 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 ago
Old, surprised it's still up, and related: http://www.linmodems.org/ http://www.linmodems.org/
- throitallaway 3y ago
  Holy heck, I remember using that. I'm so glad that the days of IRQ conflicts, Winmodems, etc. are past us.

netsharc 3y ago

I wonder how it is nowadays, PCI(e) sound cards are no longer a thing and are mostly on the motherboard (ok well the on-board chips are probably more powerful than chips on sound cards from x years ago), AMD's on-CPU GPU are quite powerful too. My network card^W chip has an option to off-load checksum calculations. 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.

premysl 3y ago
People just expect things to be integrated. Even Wi-Fi is, although it's probably typically an M.2 card. I have a <2000 computer that had both integrated audio and video, and it's kind-of become a norm. 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).
giantrobot 3y ago
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. 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.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  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. This is true, but Windows and Mac prioritize this well at the OS level. I've been using mostly USB sound devices for the last ~15 years including gaming and never any skipping or desync issues. Not sure about Linux, I have not used it as a daily driver.

dicriseg 3y ago

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!

axpvms 3y ago
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
- dicriseg 3y ago
  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.
vidarh 3y ago
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...

jwells89 3y ago

“Winmodem” brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had its hard drive fail. 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.

comprev 3y ago
For me it brings back great memories of the first PC my folks bought for the family home where they asked _me_ what spec I'd like (Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 30GB disk, 17" CRT, Soundblaster Live! 5.1, Creative Labs 5.1 speakers). One might say it was the catalyst to what became my career - and love of gaming!
WWLink 3y ago
> “Winmodem” brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had its hard drive fail. Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
- jwells89 3y ago
  The amount of time that pace kept up was also impressive, lasting well into the 2000s. 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.
JohnBooty 3y ago

chrsig 3y ago

freeing cpu/ram generally wasn't the motivator to get a hardware modem. winmodems required drivers that generally were only available for windows ("win"modem) 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.

bhumihang 3y ago
[flagged]
JohnBooty 3y ago
at a consumer level, the only people that ever knew or cared were people trying to run linux or a bsd Lots of tech support stories in the HN replies here, and the linked Anandtech discussion, that contradict that. 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.
abirch 3y ago
That's how I learned about the kernel and modules. That and getting a CD ROM to work.

dehrmann 3y ago

I just remember winmodem drivers always being finicky and rarely working.

patrakov 3y ago
On Windows, yes. On Linux, the proprietary driver was OK (consistently connecting at 48kbps and keeping it for hours), except for the micro-freeze when going off-hook. LT Win Modem.

comprev 3y ago

Buying an external US Robotics 56k modem allowed me to get online with RedHat 8 (boxset purchased from Amazon, IIRC), as the PC I had contained a PCI Win-modem with no compatible Linux drivers. It was a friend at school who introduced me to Linux. Surfing the web at home on Linux in the early 00s felt like I was in niche club :-)

1letterunixname 3y ago
Back in the day, Central Computer carried packaged RedHat and clear vinyl Slackware CD sets. One of the few brick and mortar computer and software store regional chains that still exist in the US, the other being MicroCenter. https://centralcomputer.com https://centralcomputer.com https://www.microcenter.com https://www.microcenter.com 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.
- arglebargle123 3y ago
  That's a name I haven't heard for a very long time. Central Computer was a fantastic shop.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Stratoscope 3y ago
    They are still in business, with five stores! https://www.centralcomputer.com/ https://www.centralcomputer.com/

1letterunixname 3y ago

Yep. Softmodems were hot garbage because they were generally Windows only. Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud.