How 90s dial-up Internet worked, and let's make our own ISP.
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- Up until home broad band came into existence the only way to access the internet at home was to get your modem to call the ISP's phone number and listen to the unpleasant sound that would happen.
In this video we look at the history and technology of dial-up ISPs and build one our self.
This video is sponsored by PCBWay (www.pcbway.com).
Johnny Blanchard re-enthused / reenthused
Retro Princess / retroprincess
Yesterzine / duds2k1
0:00 - Introduction
1:02 - A word from our sponsors
1:45 - Let normal service resume
3:07 - Bell 101 Modem
3:51 - Hayes Smart Modem
7:38 - Building an ISP
8:34 - Telephone line simulator
11:05 - Building a Linux Dialup Server
14:28 - Client setup
15:34 - First test
16:00 - Comparing our setup to a commercial one
19:36 - 56k modems & ISDN
25:50 - Radius
27:20 - Testing over the real phone network
29:59 - Free serve
34:50 - The coming of broad band
35:43 - Emergence service after the POTS switch off
37:27 - Thanks 
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For those who never experienced it... It's hard to describe just how high tech it felt taking a boring telephone, hooking it into a modem, and suddenly connecting to the entire world through these futuristic and slightly scary modem sounds. Hearing them again honestly gave me a chill.
Very true. I did his as a kid in the 80s through Quantumlink, a company that eventually turned into AOL. You're right... it's hard to describe this feeling that for me was being a 13 year old kid in the mid 80s suddenly talking to people from across the country on this funny thing called a modem. It felt empowering at the time, since the vast majority of adults didn't have any idea this world even existed a the time.
Then later on connecting to local bulletin board systems, and downloading all these free pirated games I could never afford. It really felt like your own little world apart from everyone else.
Then.... everyone else got here. And here we are with twitter wars. I miss that early online universe.
@@stevesether I know what you mean, the BBS scene and later on the early internet felt like we had our own world, and sure people had disagreements (who remembers flame wars in news groups) but it was still a world populated mostly people who where into computing. Then everyone else tuned up, and our world got swamped.
We had a Rubber Cup Acoustic 320 Baud Modem from Tandy Radio Shack in 1980-ish. It was necessary as my Dad had spent over $800 to upgrade our TRS Model-3 from 16K RAM to 32K RAM. I figured that was Dumb as we should have just painted Flames along the side of the Computer instead. Save $800 bucks Dad....Sheesh! XD (My first HDD was close to the size of a Toaster and had a 20 MB Capacity. I cheated with DoubleSpace and got close to 40 MB. This was of course many years later when we had the Really Good Tech.)
We would call the Lawrence Hall of Science Nova Minicomputer running BASIC on our 110 BAUD acoustic coupler on our KSR-43 TTY! Fun times!
I miss those days. Simpler times.
Two friends and I started an ISP in 1995 in southwest Michigan, based on two '486-based Linux computers, one Portmaster (serial port concentrator), and a connection to a T1. We planned on growing to 10,000 users over the course of 3 years, and hit that point in about 9 months. Subscriptions were $20 a month, and we sent a diskette with Mac or Windows software with PPP, IP stack software if the OS needed it, a very early browser, an early e-mail app, etc. Motivation came from friends and colleagues switching from Windows to IBM's OS/2 Warp in order to get access to the internet. We figured if people were willing to put up with that hassle, they'd support a more usable alternative that let them keep their preferred OS. We were absolutely right.
As our subscriber base grew, we'd add portmasters & modems, T1s (eventually larger circuits), etc. We kept our site in the basement of a spaghetti restaurant (as far as I know, it's still there), complete with 56K modems. The company is still in business (absorbed through numerous acquisitions); I still have that e-mail address :-)
After a year or so, we stopped renting equipment closet space in little towns, and switched to virtual POPs with numbers all over the Midwest... kept the financial model pretty simple.
There are still many rural areas in Michigan that don't have broadband service; I can't imagine what it must be like accessing contemporary bloated websites over dialup!
We called ISDN "It Still Doesn't Network"
@@RyanLelek Bro did you guys got in touch? I also would love hearing about these.
@@RyanLelek I have messaged you on twitter. Cheers
Damn, that's awesome.
I live in mi, i wanna dial in!
I worked for a couple ISP's in the Toledo area. Got to love going from using sportsters to Ascend TNT's and even the USR T1 modem bank and the good old days of having ISDN at home.
When I went off to college in 1997, I signed up with a local ISP. I went to pay my first bill in person, and was shocked to find that the ISP was just a little room being rented in the back of a gas station. Having only used AOL up until that point, I expected them to be huge corporations full of servers or something, but it was just 2 guys in a room full of racks of modems.
Same here, my dialup isp was sourced from in the back of a garage/used car sales business. They advertised in local news, etc, $4.99 internet service. For years I never knew how simiple it might have been to start my own.
My current ISP is still 2 guys in a room with 2 racks of servers.
@@grayrabbit2211 Today mine is cellular, $25 mth, unlimited, unthrottled. There might be 2 guys in a room full of servers still, but that's after the cellular tower hops to the hardlines and fiber optics. 😉
@@terrafirma9328 mine is still the same 2 guys who were my ISP with 33.6kbps modems though.
I also had hopes for a new layer called helium network where a radio isp google was involved with that pays in crypto, which started out great but seems to have tanked lately.
The house I live in now in the united states was previously owned by somebody who ran an ISP. One of the bedroom closets was set up as a server closet with extra power, and there was(maybe still is) 50 twisted pairs ran into the back of the house.
Having a closet like that sounds useful for non-ISP purposes as long as you could remove the excess cabling.
'Maybe' - you haven't bothered to check what's in your own house lol?
@@illegalsmirf Well its now sealed behind drywall if it is still there, but it could have been ripped out years ago. I did not go into great detail about the old ISP installation in my comment so there are things you don't know, think about that before leaving a snarky comment.
@@electr0maker436 if you ever do any renovations there please update us as I'm genuinely curious lol
Also seems like a useful room for a home network with the extra power cabling lol
I was a System Administrator at an ISP in central PA in the 1990s. We started with modem racks and terminal servers called Livingston Portmaster 2e. We worked that way until we could get channelized T1 and PRIs, which allowed us to use the Livingston Portmaster 3 and let us grow pretty big. I also got to build and manage a bunch of UNIX, and later, Linux machines and get into a lot of other technologies like T1 and T3 circuits. Still remember things like line encoding and setting up circuits on Cisco routers with a CSU/DSU. That job was so much fun. Sadly, it ended with some bitterness when the owner sold the company and it was basically pulled apart since the new company didn't care about anything other than the customer list. While it was going on though, I absolutely loved it. So much fun! Thanks for bringing the memories back!
Those 2e boxes did look very handy, the ISP I worked at was considering them. We ended up sticking with our then Linux based solution, we did however get a much more dense serial solution form spesialix which gave up 64 serial port to a machine with serial port modules we could dasiy chain together with the final one linking back to the machine. They brought it in at a very good price point for us. It only lasted a year or so as a solution before we shifted to ISDN and the portmaster 3.
I was at a telecom switch manufacturer, so we got on the ISDN PRI bus; we used the Ascend Communications switches. I was tasked with setting up the sales offices, which ranged from amazing (BT, Bell South), to "What's ISDN?" (whatever telco serviced Boulder, CO). I got wicked good at ISDN -- even had BRI to my house (with 3Com "Tollsaver(tm)", to avoid per-B-channel tariffs)... just in time to have it essentially die, in the face of broadband. Still used ISDN for VoIP on Asterisk for another decade or so, because it's just so nice from a telecom perspective. But VoIP, in myriad forms, seems to be taking over the last vestiges of legacy telecom. Even knowing that, I still boggled to hear that POTS is dying in England. Wow.
@@kendambrosio3714 The switch off of ISDN pri is a big pain for businesses here as well. As so many businesses here have an old pbx that uses ISDN for inbound/outbound calls, or some PC based solution (usually running asterisk under the hood) with a pri interface.
I worked at a small ISP at the tail end of the dial-up era. We transitioned from Livingston Portmaster 3 units to the USR TotalControl Enterprise racks as ex-AOL units started to fall cheaply in to the used market. Getting all that era hardware set up to work properly was quite the headache, but once it was up and going, it was so much nicer than watching and managing racks of modems.
I was lucky to be working Research in Vancouver in 1994 where our labs were wired internally with Fiber and we were trunked almost directly to a T1 BackBone. That was really fast at the time. Can't remember how fast however consider the fact that we needed a Crazy Russian as our IT guy...and he was damn good. He discovered that one Researcher had developed an online business (of sorts) in the BackEnd of the Server (circa 1996-8).
Reminds me when i made my own dial up ISP using 6 modems and a cable modem to give all my users free PPP access the the internet.. well.. the the cable company sued me. Ahhhh 1997 was a hell of a year
Flipping heck Paul, that was a bit of an over reaction from the cable company.
@@RetroBytesUK To be fair, it was 1997. This was before DOCSIS 1.0, so the two-way bandwidth was a tie-up if you maxed it.
Oh dear, those LANCity cable modems. They were the size and shape of car stereo amps, with heat fins hot enough to cook eggs. They'd die but the lights would keep on blinking like Christmas. I won't forget when the RCN tech replaced ours in 2001 and I kinda boggled at the normal brand, the tininess, and the increased reliability.
@Garrett W. presumably just analysing usage patterns
We had a local bank here in the mid 90s that started offering minimal online banking. As an add on they hosted their own ISP and gave you a discount. I used them as my ISP through college. I had dial up until 2006!
Had dial till 2009. It sucked. Lol
They proxied the whole internet to you from that?
Wow.
I bet you could have been a millionaire.
Luv and Peace.
I had dial-up until 2006 too. Then got a whopping 128kbps DSL lol. Though that was quickly replaced by a 1Mbps DSL service after a few months with a free upgrade offer
What did you just read? @@ianedmonds9191
Love the video, totally retro! I was one of the first ISP's 'selling' internet access in the mid 90's where I was. Started with a large stack of USR and Hayes modems on a FreeBSD 2.2.2 box. Those were the days!
Worked with someone who was running their own ISP on the side in a garage , eventually migrating to providing cheap international calls across the internet before finally retiring at 34 to a big house somewhere with a warmer climate...
I stayed on dial up far longer than I wanted. I lived out in the countryside, where there wasn't any broadband service for years after it had been universally adopted in any built up area. Websites and web services were getting really bloated because data efficiency was not much of a priority anymore, and user experience was the big thing. With broadband all the additional data transfers weren't a problem, and being always online became the norm. Using a dial up modem, with the line drops, packet drops, phone bills, and people actually having to use the line for phone calls was not a good time. Downloading a file of a megabyte in size was something you had to plan in advance, and hope it didn't get corrupted, or you would have to try again later. Online gaming was a problem not because of playing the game itself for me (sure there was lag and dropped connections), but because I couldn't get the required updates downloaded because of the sheer size of them. LAN parties were also not just for gaming, but file exchange and sharing was a huge part of it in those days for the same reasons.
"Downloading a file of a megabyte in size was something you had to plan in advance, and hope it didn't get corrupted, or you would have to try again later"
Did you not use a downloader for that? Those were essential to have.
This is happening again with copper, isps taking their sweet time getting broadband to my region.
I was stuck on it until 2011, then had issues with my DSL for months when I switched.
@@No-tw6qj Still on dsl, neighbors on both sides of the road have fiber but for some unknown reason, the isp stopped a few hundred yards from the property.
I had a leased line in '97 I think. One of the advantages of being your own ISP. We used 'bare copper' with special leased line modems on both sides. 768 KBIt/a AFAIR. In 1987 I started with a 300 bps acoustic coupler.
In 1996 (I think) I remember saving enough cash to pay for a years worth of Internet at my local ISP with a reasonable discount.
Turning up to a house on the edge of an industrial estate, I was very amused to see a bank of USR modems, just like I had one sat by my own computer, blinking away on the melamine and twin slot shelving. :) not quite what I had imagined at the time.
We had ISDN at our house, mostly because we wanted to have multiple lines. Technically we even had multiple numbers but only used one.
The advantages of multiple lines, besides being able to place multiple calls, was to have the Internet on while making calls or even double the bitrate by having the modem use two lines at once.
Yep I had ISDN for my work from year 2000 so my daughters do not know what dial up was as in the evening we had 128- 512 mbs if we bonded the four channels we had.
I remember learning about isdn and asking my parents to get one. It would have cost us about 150 dollars a month. So, that was shut down very quickly. Haha.
@@techmaster170 x, a. X , AZ x x. X, z.
We had ISDN too in the nineties, I remember the first time I tried to get ADSL from British Telecom, the sales person denied such a thing existed and insisted I was wanting ISDN!
In Germany there was actually a lot of ISDN lines around, I'd estimate about at least 30% of all telephone lines were ISDN since there was a hard political push towards it in the 80s.
64k does not sound like much today, but since ISDN was already digital it was "true 64k" in comparison to the 56k theoretical maximum of the fastest analogue modems which in practice effectively reached little more than half of their advertised speed.
Having ISDN and being Germany run by Germans it of course took us longer afterwards to adopt newer technologies like DSL, which were much faster and kept on increasing their speed when the technology underwent further development whereas ISDN kept it's specs until it was pretty much phased out on an infrastructure level in the past couple of years.
In the late 90s we had a programming instructor at my college who decided that his ISP sucked. So, he decided that he would become an ISP himself, and then service his local area with internet. Of course this was going to be expensive, and earlier we had receive a 20,000 dollar grant to help update our networking lab. I think we had spent about 5000 when the rest of the money disappeared. Funny, and I'm sure it's just a fluke, but suddenly our instructor had all the money he needed to setup his own ISP. Weird hua? They also provided email services and his son used to tell me how his dad loved to stay up all hours of the night reading other people's emails. So yes, you could indeed become an ISP in your own home.
Lol wow first I was like “awesome guy! Not taking shit from those crappy ISPs and staring his own!!” then it devolved into embezzlement of college funds and gross invasion of privacy lol
@@einsteinx2 That’s just the tip of the iceberg. But the one good thing is that a few years later he let his teaching license expire. The college had him out fast. But you could write a whole book on the dude.
@@josys363 And I would buy that book!
@@ClickItYT I would even read it!
@@josys363 Can you tell us more about this teacher? He sounds like a character. lol
Man, so many memories. I started my first IT job in 1990. I also worked on people's PC's on the side. Modems and I were wrapped up in a love hate relationship, lol. I quit that job in '95 and went to work for a reseller that sold PBX'a and what not. I can't count all the ISDN modems I installed, as well as terminal servers. (I still love terminal servers). Good times!
I remember Norway having three level of telephone rates: local, regional and national.
You were better of choosing an ISP within your local area, but a few had to select a regional number.
The telephone rates changed, only one national rate, and the area of local snall ISP soon ended.
Yes in Switzerland, too. At first we would have needed dozens if not hundreds of POPs to provide local calls to all our users, later another phone provider made it possible to do it all at once site. Then the main phone provider did something similar so we'd need only about 30 pops and in the end not even that. We even managed to negotiate with them that they paid us a part their revenue generated by calling those lines. Later this became a product available to all ISPs, but we fought hard for it.
In Phoenix Arizona, we could dial the next city over without charge, but the city on the other side of that was long distance. There was a BBS (switchbaud bbs) in central phoenix with several phone lines. you could call them and they would patch you through to another bbs in the other city without charge to you. That was the only way I could get to resources at the local university.
@@azmax623 The BBSes I used in Switzerland made a link to an US BBS once a week and we could chat with Americans just paying the local tariff. That was cool :)
In the UK at the very end of dialup internet as a thing there were a few ISPs that did unlimited (monthly fee) access - if your phone service was with the big cable providers, for example.
But yeah for the bulk of the 90s it was local rate calls and charged by the minute.
In Germany I remember a paper card wheel, not unlike the copy protection from Monkey Island, where you would dial in the current time and it would give you the current rate for different zones. It was hell.
This video was really well made, really interesting, even if the long duration was a bit scary at first.
Hearing the technical side of things I used to work with is really refreshing.
Thank you
I have the (miss)fortune of having caught the tail end of dial up here in the US from a mix of both getting into computers really young and dial-up sticking around in the states well into the early to mid 2000's. I used NetZero back in the day as well as dialing into a few local BBSes that where still up at the time that where mostly dedicated to file sharing. I do not miss the speeds of dial-up at all but this was a nice trip down memory lane.
If you were in to BBSing growing up (I was despite it being the dying days of it) you might enjoy this documentary: ruclips.net/video/Dddbe9OuJLU/видео.html&ab_channel=JasonScott
Actually, I do miss the time when such speeds were enough and useful. No need for Mbps for reading news, chat with people, or fill in simple order or booking forms. Many worked faster than today, with contemporary connections. Better UIs too.
While it is nice to have high speeds, I find way more important to have art of using them sparingly and efficiently. It is becoming lost art. Hope the component shortage pushes some pressure to reverse the coure of ever more obese software bloat.
NetZero was fun! I remember figuring out how to use it without their stupid client, so you could get free internet without having a 1/4 of your screen covered in advertisements.
Had dial up until 2006.
I feel your pain. It was a golden time of web exploration, Geocities and all.. Didn't get, DSL didn't become available in my major city untill I was in grade 10. That's about 2005. Even then it was DSL1. 1.5mbps. the nation wide rollout for something better (fibre to premise, hybrid fibre coax and the dreadful fibre to the node (then copper to your place), didn't start until 2015~ and only about 2019 ish did it hit easy availability.
This is one of the coolest and nerdiest things ever. I used to deal with all that crap, all the way back to the 14.4 days. It seemed magical then, and it's just grown exponentially ever since.
14.4 was magic to me, I was stuck on 12.6 for the longest time till a new modem got me up to a 40+ kbps connection.. was glorious.
I inherited a 14.4 portable modem in 1993, got a phone line installed in my student hovel (not rich but loving parents) and ran a one-line MBBS for a little while, doing ANSI art, the whole shebang. I still thing the names I chose for it (couldn't decide which was more badass) -- Bad Sector BBS and The Lost Cluster BBS -- are the best BBS names ever.
Years later when ISDN came I budgeted having one line connected 24/7, and have the other available for phones etc -- it cost about 200 quid a month back in 2001.
I was VERY happy when I upgraded to a 1 (one) Mbit SDSL line, so I could run an FTP server AND download at full speed.
All this makes me (and others my age) extremely aware of the magic that is gigabit fiber, which is my current connection. I used to DREAM about 100Mbit cable connections in the late '90s
Man, I started back on qlink with a 300 baud unit that you had to physically put the handset on it. As I got a little older and started playing games online, I remember trying every trick in the book to squeeze every ounce of bandwidth out of our phone line. Use to drive my mom nuts.
Fascinating video! As someone who has worked in telecommunications and the ISP business for over 30 years I knew a lot of the facts you presented, but I learned a lot too and the way you told the story was engrossing. Thanks for sharing!
One of my first jobs was IT support helping new customers get connected to our local service. I was in the modem room and had to tune out the modem sound during my conversations. i learned a lot about the field and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. watching your video explained a lot of what my ISP was doing back in the day and the conversion from cardinal 33.6 modems to rocketboards which went a long way in clearing the air during calls. thanks a lot for this video! Most appreciate this in-depth view
ISDN was really a thing here in Germany. 64kb/s and a second phone line (and 3 numbers) or 128kb/s for double the cost👍. I even had a flat rate for unlimited time/data = unlimited illegal music downloads 🤭. Or you could get a flat amount of data package 24/7 online for irc chats 24/7 or web browsing where you where charged by data not time. In the 80s there was Datex P. A packaged based system where you dialed in to a local number provided by the Deutsche Bundespost and you where charged by amount of data and not distance to connect to your favorite BBS (if connected to datex P too) they where not limited by the amount of modems = users only by the max data rate. P stood for Packet. So something like the german TCP/IP for dial up.
As always great video!
Ah yes real ISDN (64k and dedicated D channel) UK had real ISDN and non of that switched ISDN like the USA with their 56k, but then the difference between E1 and T1 lines with bit-stealing for the billing data/D channel stuff did that.
Wasn't as common in the UK for consumers due to initial installation costs being a wack, though did bite the bullet in the 90's and oh wow, was great. Was also ISP's that did it and with cunning and moving ISP's you could game their services nicely. Was one that did a 0800 (free call) offering that was a one-off join fee of like £20 and found out if you paid twice you could dial-in twice and do a bonded ISDN connection. The only downside was it would drop you every 2 hours so you had to redial, but hey - cheapest internet near on ever.
For perspective, I was working at the time for large pharma distribution in the UK (FTSE 100 size) and they only had a single 64k internet connection for the entire head office and me at home had 128k. Interestingly enough they had large banks of modems attached to RS/6000's to take customer terminal orders upon psion based handhelds that they would log their order and send via modem.
Interestingly, 3pm was always the most likely time to have issues with dial-up modems back then. Curse America waking up and sudden surges of calls between the two pushing the phone network, making those dirty and bad lines more likely to be used in routing. used to call 3pm the twilight hour.
One thing we had often in the UK and unsure about yourself in Germany was that the exchange would log bit errors, so if over a period of time you had X amount of bit errors your ISDN line would stop working and you would call the telco, who would run their tests and tada - no errors. What happened was when they run their set of tests to check the line, it resets the error count for bit errors at the exchange - so clears the issue and why suddenly the line would start working. Also why many would suffer poor quality lines without knowing beyond it going down every so often and each time BT would test and go it's ok as they see no issue and you would go oh it's working now and bless, that would if you didn't know mug of many a customer forever.
Datex P was actually not a German development but was based on the X.25 Standard and existed, probably under different names, also in other countries. So „Datex P“ was just the branding.
As I understand it, it was because of German reunification. East Germany's Soviet phone system was so obsolete and in disrepair, they decided to build a completely new one. In the early 90's ISDN was the future, so that's what they got.
In Finland ISDN cost the same per minute as normal calls and the base fee was higher so I never got the idea. For me the speed was not the main issue, the cost was. I always feared the phone bill. The two month bill varied 125-175 €.
Home ISDN was very cool for a very brief time in the UK, BT offered it as "Home Highway" and the people that had it were the envy of every Quake player since the pings were so good.
Great Video! I'm remembering my USR 56K v90 until I upgraded to DSL in 2002. Went to 400 kbs and thought I died and went to digital heaven. Great times. Keep up the great content!
I remember downloading “photo’s” as an older teenager. Each took an age to download and I had sweat it out hoping my parents wouldn’t find out about my endeavors. Oh, the good old days !
Those very first dial up experiences felt like setting foot in a grand palace. I struggled to get to grips with the idea that the internet wasn't owned by one entity.
And now decades later I am still in awe by modern networking technology. In particular wireless tech. Wifi, cell etc.
What I do miss is people who are in the moment. It feels weird to walk on the street and see everyone holding their phone as if life depends on it.
Amen to people "being in the moment." That's one reason I'm going back to a Nokia 225. It's a limited app capability "candy bar" phone. Social Media and Google search can be a useful too, but has a double edged sword of making zombies out of people.
They don't appreciate the usefulness or convenience of the tech anymore. Problem solving skills and "thinking outside the box" has been almost systematically replaced with "let me Google it" or check Facebook instead of "let me think about this and search my own brain's memory for a second.
Nonetheless, I am also attracted to open-source KaliOS (I think it's called ?), a Linux distro out of TCL's parent company developed in Hong Kong. Yes, true, Android uses Linux as a base. But it's at such a small scale and there's so much Google on top to give Apple a run for its money on locking everything behind bars.
Sorry for the lecture. lol. Just thought of it when you mentioned "holding their phones as if life depended on it."
I'll never forget our first PC was an AT&T Globalyst (never even seen this model on eBay) with 16 MB RAM, awesome color depth CRT monitor, floppy, CD-ROM, 14.4 modem and I think a 10 gig hard disk (outstanding for 1995!).
I don't think it had the cute toys of touch screen keyboards and voice activated emojis (shivers at the comparison between the two eras).
I'm getting real sick of seeing people (mostly young females) walking along all holding their phones, or worse - looking at them as they walk (no doubt reading messages or tiktoks or whatever). It seems they just can't go for even a moment without being on their phones. I curse modern technology not for what it represents and how it can work for us but for what it has done to people.
I used to work at an ISP Back in the 90's , as soon as I got to work I had to check the modem pool ( Hundreds of USR Modems, to ensure none were hung up ) Happy days! =)
Thank you for these 30 minutes of awesome laidback content. Really enjoyed the ride and learned a few things although I was online during the early 2000s! Born '93 - so I saw quite a lot of the evolution happening, albeit a bit blurred because i was in hospital a lot due to my visual impairment. Still, I can claim that "i was there" ^^
Dialup, ISDN, DSL. Those were the steps I remember about my home's internet back when I was young and my parents actually cared for technology in their mid-30s early 40s. During the times of DSL, I learned about lots of the technology myself and soon ended up helping them pick contracts and options. I also fondly remember the earr4pe when trying to phone my friend which reminded me that I could probably find him online instead - or my LimeWire downloads stopping because my mom said "nope" XD. Yeah... it was quite a time with a 2000kbit/s DSL downlink - the uplink was...uh...it existed. x) As I live in germany, I can confirm that ISDN was huge here and just about everyone I knew was using it - either with a model, or later with a DSL by using - if i remember right - a frequency splitter. Weird device that took data and phone into one cable and ran that into the wall. o.o I think I still have such a splitter here too as a leftover from old hardware. Also, when I moved to my new flat, I actually did go for a split modem/router+ap setup (DrayTec Vygor167 + Razer Sila) because I kinda like the idea of a one-purpose device... just me being weird, really. But the idea of plugging a "modem" into my wall and using the router+ap's WAN to link up PPPoE is pretty cool. I mean, technically, my PS2's broadband adapter can do PPPoE so I could log it in... xD
This is a fantastic video, really well put together. My first tech job was for a regional ISP just after they had moved to lots of Ascend Max kit, brought back a lot of memories.
I remember how I bragged my U.S Robotics modem to my peasant friends who only had poor PCI modems. The U.S Robotics modem was famous for not dropping the dial-up call, amazing technology back in the day.
I use to work at the US Robotics factory in Mt Prospect Illinois in the 90s. I must've tested millions of modems before they shipped manufacturing overseas. This video made me feel nostalgic for those days. Seeing a Courier and Sportster modem brought a flood of memories back to me. Thanks for this.
US Robotics and Diamond Supra were by far the best.
I too worked at an exchange when Freeserve came onto the scene. And I have something to say...
My colleagues and I started dropping our AOL accounts, one by one, for this 'free' internet access, sans monthly fee.
After a couple of weeks or so, randomly, our passwords were all rejected - forcing us to call in at the near £1 / min for 'support' to reset it.
Despite the password never being changed.
This password rejection behaviour was n e v e r seen with AOL.
Clearly Freeserve's model wasn't working so well, and necessitated these expensive 'support calls' to survive.
We were disgusted, and all moved to Compuserve, which supported IMAP, which allowed us to use Outlook, which we needed for business use anyway.
Therefore I'll never forget you 'free'-serve.
Freeserve type models were attempted here in Australia. They failed due to horrendously slow speeds. You might connect at >33.6K but the data transfer was so damn slow it made the internet basically unusable.
In those days I used a dialup plan for about AUD $50 (UK £30) per month for unlimited usage, but they would kick you every few hours (I just had an auto-redial set up). With a second phone line, I just ran an old P133 box with Win95 as a Proxy Server and 24/7 downloader machine.
When Cable broadband started getting offered in year 2000, I was an early adopter with a 100mb/s down and massive 500GB per month for expensive AUD $100 (UK £60 ). It was just incredible, and even 15 ore more years later we still don't achieve the same speeds over FTTN+ADSL.
They are killing off the Cable Internet here, although some ISPs are using the RF Cable lines to deliver ADSL-based services rather than running new copper. We were suppose to get Fiber To The Premises but that only happened in a few small areas and most of it is just as slow as the old ADSL over Copper.
@Not Sure Why is there a blank line after each one of your sentences?
@@johncoops6897 I got so frustrated with the way we had to endure the lack of interest by consecutive govts in infrastructure for internet outside of Syd. and Melb. GST Johnny just didn't understand the importance of broadband to the suburbs or businesses so on it crept, painfully slowly until ADSL2 for me. For a country which had one of the highest computer-to-household ownerships in the world in the early 2000's, it became embarrassing. Those bloody Telstra Bigpond discs with 60 minutes of internet access on them for $9.99 lol.
When I was very young I managed an ISP for a local computer store.
We had 1 a dual Pentium pro server running Slackware 2.0
We had about 800 customers.
And we had an excellent (for the time) dual ISDN backbone. Oddly contention was never that high.
We also did provide a shell to some of our customers.
Very, very good, John! Lots of excellent information that is well presented. You really took me for a long ride down memory lane. It was all so wild west back in the day!
Awesome video! Brings back a lot of memories working for MCI in the 90's. Sadly, the POTS lines have gone the way of the dodo here in the US as well. I only know of a few folks in very rural towns up north that still have a land line. Such a shame!
It will be a sad day when pots goes completely. Rural areas still dont have a good alternative.
Whoever ended such a reliable system is an idiot that deserves no recognition.
@@RetroBytesUK Many rural areas in Appalachia (Kentucky, West Virginia) still don't even have broadband of any sort! T-Mobile has become their saviors by rolling out 5G with 100 GB limits, thousands of times the capacity that they could get from wires.
There is a thick phone line with 600 pairs on the poles in front of my house. I wonder how many of those are still being used.
One of my Small Business Clients mentioned that they were still running on POTS lines as of about two months ago. The Phone Co. kept raising the monthly charges each year until finally they were paying $ 400.00 a month for just (02) POTS lines here in 2022. So they had to switch due to cost and are now on VOIP as a result.
4:00 *"You then take your phone and place it in the cradle”*
These were called "acoustic couplers". My first ran at 75 baud (not bps), and generally it took multiple attempts - dial the number then as soon as you heard the screech slam the handset into the coupler and hope they handshake. Then watch everything scroll by so slowly, you could literally read everything twice before it reached the top of the screen. Ah, the good old days.
How pedantic! (... and correct:) )
The Hayes smartmodem User Manual mentions
- acoustic coupler[s]: 6 times
- cradle: 0 times
And by the way, this was in the mid ‘80s and I was dialing into mainframes not BBSes.
It is a bit silly to nit pick on the term. At its lowest crudest implementation, 1 baud = 1 bps so yeah, its 75 bps UNLESS you had the newer techniques in your modem that allowed twice or quad the number of bits per baud. For example the 9600bps modem was actually 2400baud (4 bits per baud). Now for obvious reasons doing it backwards does matter which was a common mistake some people did.
@@freeculture So you’re saying pointing out that bps baud matters, but pointing out that baud bps is nitpicking?
But my point was not about the technical differences (baud is state changes; bps is data transmission), but that at the time baud, like "acoustic coupler", was the terminology generally employed.
I worked for one of Ne Zealand's first ISP. I remember shelves of 56k modems stacked on top of each other and then the wonder of a rack of modem cards. It was an amazing industry to work in during the 90's. Lots of fantastic changes. I miss the sound of that dialup handshake.
New Zealand's PSTN shutdown started in 2020 with a completion of 2023.
We had our first Internet access from home via dial-up, with Earthlight and then Efficient Software, which later merged with Ihug. It was always tricky to avoid annoying the parents by tying up the phone line! Quite a leap forward from the 2400-baud BBS access we had earlier in the 90s, though that had a charm of its own. I always wondered if ISPs did indeed just have stacks of modems in their centres, and if they'd need one per dial-up customer.
Oh wow, and there was that bizarreness with Telecom introducing a new dialling prefix and charges to try to deal with the fact that so many dial-up calls terminated with competing telcos, meaning lost money for Telecom - I'd forgotten about that.
My first job was for a similar early NZ ISP. Not sure if good times, or just times ;)
lol i thought I was the only kid wondering about the other end back then@@thromboid
Glad to see you got a sponsor. You're a top notch channel and you deserve all the success you get!
Such an excellent video! Really enjoyed this. I do something similar with some of my retro machines, except direct serial connections without a modem in between.
Nice. I owned and administered a small ISP in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the 90s and you pretty much nailed it what happened to us. We started with CISCO2511s RAS, but at some point, we had more lines than CISCO ports, so I picked up a Pentium Server with LINUX, added a Cyclades MultiSerial card and a few USRobotics consumer grade 33.3 modems and in a long Saturday expanded our system to take care of the additional lines (which by then, were needed as out traffic increased). Exactly as you have shown here. Later, once we got 2xE1 lines (that's 60 digital 64K ISDN channels) we installed a Lucent (later Livingston) PortMaster 3 and made the jump into 55.6K (and ISDN) access. We implemented RADIUS, but still maintained the original analog lines to reduce congestion on peak hours. So, we migrated CISCO and LINUX servers to RADIUS. Also, at some point in time, during the Windows 95 era, we made PPP-Authentication mandatory. It allowed for better user/password maintenance (centralized in a firewalled server) and helped us join services like Ipass, which was a worldwide roaming network that would provide access for our users while traveling (through other local ISPs), including internationally. Our first strategy to compete as Broadband came in was to use WIFI radio, which we installed in several residential buildings which we cabled with Ethernet to provide always on NAT and firewall protected access. We ended up selling our ISP to another, larger radio based ISP which themselves could not resist the competition from telcos and cable and ended up closing shop. Like you mention, we also provided commercial services, like webhosting, server hosting and even webdesign.
Also, just to add some of the early services we provided and I guess were quite common. At that time, our connection to the Internet was limited, so we needed to try to maximize bandwidth efficiency. We implemented transparent proxy web server (which was highly effective on these early days of static pages) and we were a Tucows mirror, so people could download shareware software directly from our server without using the congested bandwidth.
Found this video in my suggestions, really great video explaining the tech. I spent my formative years on the internet in the mid-90s, reaching the pinnacle of dial-up, a 56k Diamond Supra Express 56e Pro modem, which on a good day, I'd reach speeds of 6.3KB/sec, a couple of years before the blistering speeds of BT broadband. Thanks for the explanation and memories, I've subscribed, and look forward to binge watching your previous content.
Great summary! It was really interesting to see the similarities and differences between what I experienced in the US versus what was going on in the UK. So many things had me feeling nostalgic, too (seeing the modems and brand names, the AT commands, the DTMF tones and handshake sounds, mentions of Trumpet Winsock/setting up SLIP and PPP connections, and much more). It was funny being a teenage computer geek in the 90s and thinking the coolest kid in town wasn't Johnny Football Hero, it was the guy who was Sysop of his very own BBS (with 2 dedicated phone lines, no less!).
LOL at the "Johnny Football Hero" line.
Makes me think of the successful "nerd" outcasts from the usual high school cliques who, for example, played hand-held, red LED football and baseball games in the 1970's; BASIC coders with 300 baud modems on ATARI's, Commodores, IBM's, Tandy's and what have you in the 1980's, to Sysop's of ASCII art chat rooms in the Mach 10 era of 14.4 modems in the 1990's.
Point is, the quiet smart ones have always advanced science, medicine, physics, and put astronauts on the moon with a 4 kilobyte guidance computer while the jock heroes were sometimes flipping burgers after high school wrapped up.
Though depending on your point of view for "successful" that could be completely reversed so that the 100 million a year contracts of the Johnny's who did make it to the NFL were better off than the designers of the Saturn 5 rockets.
But I digress. I guess like Einstein said, neither POV is wrong when judging distance to your destination while on a passenger train...depending on where you are on the train.
"Eye of the beholder..."
Back in the day, the first modem I owned was a 300 baud Atari modem designed for the 8-bit Atari 800 computer. I thought it might be fun to set up a BBS on it, but I found the modem didn't have a ring indicator. So, I wired a neon bulb to the phone line and taped it to a photoresistor connected to the analog paddle input of the Atari. The 90v ring voltage would light up the bulb indicating a call, and the computer would pick up.
Too bad I didn't have a phone line simulator, so I had to call from another user's house for testing, :-)
Jim Steele, I wish I had one of those, I did have one for the apple 2e , but I always loved my Atari. Did you ever order one of the free technical demopak's?
I guess you could call that a...bright idea.
@@r0ckt3hc4sb4h I don't remember ordering those. But I did have the tech manual and De Re Atari.
one that I found most useful was about using peek and poke to control the joystick ports like a bunch of 5V TTL GPIO pins. I don't remember what the rest of them were about.
@@petevenuti7355 Yeah, one of the magazines had an article on using the joystick ports to control a TI speech synthesizer chip. I built one of those and then my Atari started sounding like Steven Hawking.. :-)
Thanks for the video. Enjoyed seeing the USRobotics Courier at 7:41. I had a couple of these tanks when I ran a BBS in the early 90s. One was an earlier HST only at 14.4, then I got a Dual Standard and I think it went to 24 something I don’t remember. Gradually people stoped using the proprietary HST and moved onto the faster v.32bis. Oh the good old days!
I would have loved to use it but still cant find the PSU. The annoying part is it does not say the power requirements on the modem at it would seam they shipped identical looking modems with different PSU's. So I reluctantly ending up buying a USB modem (not a software one), which where surprisingly cheep.
Super interesting. I can't imagine all the work behind this video. Positively surprise to see re-enthused here :) And thanks to you, now I know 2 new great channels. I'd say those were 38 minutes well spent :) Merci !
Great video! I used to work for an ISP here in the states and we used the US Robotics Total Control Units (TCUs) for our POPs. Amazing piece of technology!
You've brought back memories of my Demon dial-up connection and Turnpike software grabbing my email and latest newsgroup activity to avoid long calls. Good times. Long browsing sessions hunting the nearly advert-free Internet for technical data cost quite a lot, but were worth every penny.
That's worrying about the shutdown of the traditional system and reliance on the evolving fibre and 5G networks. I wonder if the multiple local nodes will have any proper battery backup at all, and if it will actually be looked after.
It conjures up movie-style images of storm/war ravaged people desperately trying to get back on the 'net with battered Starlink dishes and solar panels.
Solar roofs, powerwalls and Starlink - maybe Elon has seen the future.
are you circuit twitching?🫵🤣
The man The legend big Clive 🎉
I was A Dial Access Implementation engineer for UUnet back in the day when broadband was just being tested. fun days! Now a Lucent Max TNT fully loaded was one hell of a modem! In one center I installed 80 of them lol. Was awesome to be able to connect my laptop at 100Mbs full-duplex to the core net.
Going out on a Friday night. Nah
Watching videos about old tech. Hell yeah
agreed ;)
I've been looking at setting up a little dial up system for my retro PCs to talk to each other for multiplayer gaming.
Mostly for the theatrics of the modem noises, and also since null modem cables can work for 2 machines, but not for more than that.
Also, the cables aren't particularly expensive, so if you can get the PBX part of the system working...
edited in: Oh, and I guess you can get more range than is convenient with RS-232.
i have a setup just for doing that
Good stuff, great video. I lived this on the inside, on a team of engineers building the Internet for a telco, from dialup all the way through fiber. Used modems since the early early 80s. Now I’m nostalgic.
Dialup was pretty fascinating for me at first, also during the time it was our only option. Once I understood how it worked it amazed me that somewhere there was a dedicated modem somewhere speaking to me and every other customer of the ISP - I think I first imagined lots of little boxes but came to realise it was a single card in a very densely packed rack, I still would have liked to see them all though and given the growth of big dialup ISPs in the 90s it must have been a huge amount of equipment.
I also remember vividly that with Windows 98 and my parents getting a dedicated second internet phone line I could easily bond two modems together (called 'multilink' if I'm remembering correctly) for 12KB/sec overnight 'backups' downloads.
Seeing them may have shattered your picture of order and scale - I worked at one and had friends who worked at others, and it was mostly whatever shelves that were cheap, with the old modems on some shelves, the newer type on others, and a LOT of cables. With ongoing change, as sooner or later each modem would likely expire from heat death or some other symptom of being used a good portion of every day. More multiway trailing sockets to power all those wall warts (even when they had multi-head adaptors to run a handful from each socket) and octopus cables plugged into card after card plugged into the servers. to hook 8 modems at a time to them. Portmasters were *so* expensive - but took away so many problems, as well as offering more features.
Loved this so much! I remember as a kid running up a £300+ bill dialling into BSBs, which my parents were less than happy about - oops. Then came Demon, amazing times. Best was the 0800 "BT employee only" number, which I definitely never used for hours on end.
Definitely all changed when ISPs got into bed with new telcos at deregulation. Our student house had a phoneline from out cable company (think it started as Videotron before various later acquisitions. Free calls (upto 1h) to others on their network and I think all local numbers - and several ISPs hopped onto their network, for that reason. House server hung up every 59 minutes then redialled automatically. It was a pre-mobiles world but as a bunch of geeks sharing a house, we never had much need for making voice calls. IIRC we were still using 10base2 between everyone's x86 PCs (linux and windows) and SLIP over serial cables for others.
Demon were great till Scottish Power took them over, when right down hill after that. I just use to love logging into their servers, Named after demon's Asmodeus one of them was called, i think. What a eductional time it was, having to navigate the internet with nothing more than gopher's, ferrets and FTP,. I didn't enjoy the BT bill though, when it came , it was so heavy it was delivered by truck. I remember you didn't even have to look at the modem to see what speed it connected at, you could tell just by the sound. Great times.
Retrobytes and 9-Bit Show and Tell. You guys do a splendid job in your presentation of forgotten tech. Always a pleasure.
This is one of my favorite videos. I watch it almost every day. Thankyou
A lot of ISPs (in the US at least) had UseNet (NNTP) servers as well. I worked at an ISP in the early 90s and the newsgroups were a big part of what people used. ISDN (2B+D) was fairly popular for businesses here before DSL was available.
We were Mac based and used MacRADIUS, Eudora Internet Mail Server, Imagina Newsgroup Server, and AIX on an original ANS (you can imagine what we called it) for file sharing. I don't remember what we used for DNS. We had to use Timbuktu one at a time to create or reset accounts. We only served Mac users and had to send CDs or Floppies to customers with the IP stack all pre-configured. We eventually ripped it all out and replaced everything with Red Hat and Solaris and started supporting WinTel users as well. They provided me with an ISDN line and it seemed so fast! Most people were still on dial-up, so I had an advantage playing Mech Commander.
Ah, 56k Modems! The best thing I did at home with my parents was to talk my dad into getting a separate phone line installed for my modem. No more being kicked off the Internet and kicked out of a Quake/Quake 2 match, where I was most definitely a LPB with my 56k and then cable modem (telewest) and my fresh-from-the-us 3DFX Voodoo card.
Oh, yes, those were the days. *sigh*
Haha... yeah I remember those days as well. I had a Voodoo 3 2000 and was playing Quake CTF on 56k. I even experimented on using dual 56k modems with two phone lines. Back when the dialups didn't care about how many times your account logged in simultaneously. I was lucky and had a small local ISP so I had pretty good connection.
Coming back to this video having seen it around 8 months ago because I was thinking about how great it was and realised I don't even remember what channel it was on. Took a few minutes to find this again. I'm surprised it's only 38 minutes long, I remember it lasting at least an hour but being compelling the whole way through. I guess this video has a way of packing a ton of information in only a half hour :) certainly worth watching again.
I worked for American Online from 1999 to 2002. This was an excellent explanation of everything. Well done.
Ah… a dose of snarky British technology history.
Just what I needed on a Friday.
Luckily for us, copper POTS telephone networks are still commonplace here. I've got one POTS line through our local Bell distributor and another simulated line over VOIP through Charter. Works surprisingly well calling between them with a modem, so maybe different carriers use different compression.
Brings back memories, I still remember how excited when I got my first 56k modem and how I was the fastest kid around.
First video of yours ive stumbled upon while setting up a virtual XP machine of all things! Enjoyed the video very much.
Huh, interesting. Here in Canada, when we got switched to VOIP the ISP installed a backup battery on the fibre panel. Of course, we still would have to have an old-fashioned phone that can be powered from the line, but our plan if that ever becomes necessary is to use the UPS from my PC to power the phone.
There has not been a requirement on the teleco here for that. So saddly at the moment here as soon as a power cut hits the street cabinate looses power and the connection drops. I'd love a requirement to be placed on the telco for that.
Cathode Ray Dude has an amazing video about modems and standards and all that; recommended as a great companion piece to this vid :)
I think I may have to watch that just based on the name of the channel alone.
@@RetroBytesUK highly recommend his channel!
@@RetroBytesUK He also did a video similar to this one called Dialing Up At Home using a cheap 2 port VOIP ATA instead of the telephone line simulator to fake the telephone company/phone lines
Thanks for another brilliant video, great showcase of how broad your knowledge is, so much I didn't know. This one calls to mind the sense of achievement in first getting a 2400+MNP+compression connection working correctly ... and some time later, setting up a kind-of internal ISP for some of my employer's lucky homeworkers, all based on NeXTStations - scale-out achieved by adding more pizza boxes each with two Hayes modems connected to the oddball serial ports :D Happy days, or at least seems that way in retrospect.
WOW! THANKS SO MUCH for the walk down memory lane for me! Yes I am that old after 31 years in Telecom, shocked kind of that BT is retiring POTS :( I remember so much of that and had my daughters raised on ProComm and BBS's that they still laugh about... ALL THE BEST and Cheers from across the pond! :)
To add to the emergency usage conversation: Here in the States, we've more or less adopted a full-swing ditching of POTS for emergency use. Forbid you get stuck on an elevator during a mass power outage, because the government approved solution are these sturdy little cellular boxes with a 24-hour minimum battery backup.
This is all well and good, but like mentioned in the video, here in the States, our cell networks will also go kaput in large situations and isn't uncommon. You can't call a cell tower that's been knocked down, burned to the ground, or lifted into the sky by a tornado. If the power has gone out due to one of our "exceedingly rare" weather conditions, you're effectively on your own. Best wishes to those stuck between floor 7 and 8.
It's hard to describe to regulators how durable the Bell 103 standard is/was. You could have seriously degraded, battered lines, and you could still get a relatively clear data transmission through. It'll be slow, but it'll be _reliable_. When you have only one chance to get a message through, it really is/was a gold standard of reliability.
oh, they *know*, they just don't care. the *military* still maintains some dedicated POTS lines, naturally.
I think you're ignoring the massive cost for keeping pots going. I used to work for a company that got $60,000 every year from the federal government for delivering phone service to a piece of rural USA that had a population of a few hundred.
That copper had to be replaced about every 30 years, it requires training to service (that's different from basically all other technology/networking, and isn't provided in many colleges), requires special tools (not terribly expensive, but more then a wrench set) and pots inside house wiring is both becoming uncommon and going bad as well. (We basically forced anyone who needed their phone lines in their house worked on to only get service to one spot no multiple locations or whatever). We also had to run +100 miles of copper wire for our area. That's not cheap, even if it's hung on a pole instead of buried. (Depending on a lot of things $2.50-20 per foot)
Basically, even with federal subsidized phone system, the phone side of the business was a loss every month. Fewer and fewer people wanted home phone service. Which is why we were going digital.
I'm also going to point out that there were very few incidents where there were extended power outages that also didn't kill our phone lines (ergo no phone service). Flood, insane blizzard and Semi accident.
Focusing on this extremely weird edge case (stuck in an elevator, unable to use your cellphone or the phone in the elevator) is crazy. Why not just mandate elevators have to lower themselves and open their doors on power loss? Or have someone check the elevators when the power goes out? Or any number of less crazy things then blowing billions of dollars on a service and technology that is otherwise useless to cover millions of square miles, has fewer and fewer people who are willing to pay for it and isn't useful for many modern services. (DSL is nice and all, but it's dying as well and is struggling to keep up with modern internet speeds. Sure, there's some crazy good speeds, but only on really well maintained lines and only over very short distances)
Let Plain Old Telephone Service lines die. We've wasted so many billions and we literally fund horrible companies like CenturyLink and Frontier.
Not only that, but as soon as the landline service gets knocked out, people start flocking to their mobile phones, as more and more people flock to their mobile phones, this puts a higher power requirement on the phone tower, as the phone tower starts drawing more and more power from its backup, this reduces the amount of time it can remain running on backup.
So while a tower might (as an example) run for a week with say 30 people utilising it (on and off), as soon as say 300 people jump on it, and they use it constantly, that goes from 1 week of backup power to a couple of days at most before it goes dark.
@@thomascroghan9255 "Focusing on this extremely weird edge case (stuck in an elevator, unable to use your cellphone or the phone in the elevator) is crazy. "
17,000 people per year in the US alone, and outside of the largest of cities, lots of elevators are halfway-house faraday cages. I travel frequently for work and while I rarely totally lose connection in elevators, I see degraded service often. Would I trust my life on that? No. Honestly I think it's silly anybody would.
And about the "replaced every 30 years" thing... so? Cell towers have a largely narrower lifespan of 10 years, 30 if you're taking good care of it. I understand that taking care of it for a narrow use is expensive, but it feels like saying "We could go with 20x less fire departments because it's really wet here and benefits are expensive to pay out."
I'm fine if we want to get rid of POTS due to loss costs, but we can't put forward a bad solution. Cellular is a bad solution. At least, it's bad _by itself_ .
@@ray73864 A couple months ago, we had a cyclone that took out many, many parts of the electricity network in my part of New Zealand. Some homes were not reconnected for nearly a week. Somehow, my home didn't lose power, but my parents did, for about 18 hours. The cell service was getting pretty bad after only 9 hours or so. Many homes in their area use 4G cell service as their internet, due to poor, and expensive, ADSL service. Cell towers that hadn't had electricity restored within 24 hours or so, ceased to work at all.
Y'know. I know this is an "old" video, but I really feel mixed hearing about how in the 80s BT could switch an entire system to a new one, yet now we're stuck on wire.
It really shows how times and views have changed from "do as needed" to "do as paid".
Thank you! your video is really informing, I've been working in the ITC industry for the past 5 years, and never read about ISDN (only saw it on the back of a cisco modem) now I know what it was, and what it did. thanks to you!
Appreciate your knowledge and experience, love your delivery. Subscribed.
BT has paused the roll out of digital voice this week for the exact reasons you listed so will be interesting what they come up with.
That's really good news.
@@RetroBytesUK its only slowing the inevitable. when a person who was sticking with the landline for emergency use, moves out or passes away, someone new will move into the house and be wanting "modern internet" and that address will never go back to landline. and when someone moves house they wont be able to go back to landline at the new house if its already gone. your other point about mobile phone providers being forced to provide massive backup in the event of prolonged power loss is the absolute minimum but wont keep it working if the tower (antennas) are damaged.
As someone mentioned above, here in Canada the telcos are mandated to have backup power for a certain period of time and will also supply backup batteries for the CPE which handles the VOIP (although you have to pay for them, because capitalism). At least something like that would present a better option than shoulder shrugging when the power is off for an extended period of time!
I'd love to see someone show how to make a 56k ISP using an old/used Lucent Portmasters or something. Just to get a better grasp of what is involved to support digital modem. And then maybe start reverse-engineering it and create some open-hardware that can emulate it all for those who would love to play at 56k speeds. I've been looking for such information for ages without success.
No reason you couldn't do it in software with a standard sound card. You'd need a real math and DSP expert though - I've read the specifications. Modulation is trivial up to 1200bps, and then gets steadily more and more sophisticated as speeds increase. By 33/56, it's a real nightmare to understand how it works.
I once created a telemetry supervision station (SCADA system) that supported 12 outgoing and 4 incoming modem connections using standard Eicon Diva 4BRI-8M PCI-cards in a Windows PC attached to 8 ISDN-BRI lines. The incoming lines were in theory 56k capable, but the analog devices on the other end did not support that. No special software was needed.
I would love to work on something like this. I've been mulling over a concept to build a home multi-line simulator and set up an ISP for my retro computers. It would be really cool to DIY a DSP-based modulator for the CO side. Probably a touch out of my wheelhouse though. :-\
@@nickwallette6201 Agreed. It would be a cool retro-tech project to work on, which I'm sure the retro community would love.
Wish I had the time to invest.
@@nickwallette6201 If it's just a home sim, you don't actually need the modem: You only need serial crossover cables.
I worked at an ISP in the MSP area in the late 90s and early 00s - they started out as an ISP mostly providing ISDN service. We eventually became legendary in our region.
They quickly added fractional T-1 and full T-1 options, as well as e-mail, web hotels, and the usual options. Later on ADSL, SDSL, and more advanced options were offered. The businesses who had the SDSL service and were located within our local telco CO were able to get by using an alarm circuit (which cost perhaps $20 a month) for us to feed the signal over; we did all sorts of neat cool tricks to link up our downtown neighborhood. We had a point to point wireless link to the building across a street we simply couldn't get a digging permit for, and we set up a series of home-brew routers we put in the utility closets of all of the adjacent (and via skyways) buildings; and we sold them internet service for a really cheap price, especially for the era.
We did have a small shelf of actual 56k modems, but we also had a whole rack full of Ascend gear to terminate calls, ISDN connections. Next to them were several racks of Bay, Cisco and other gear to terminate the T-1 and fractional T-1 customers.
Some nice benefits were a billiards table, a foosball table, a patio on the roof, free microbrew in the fridge on Fridays, and a really fun atmosphere. We had our customers over every few weeks for a nice social hour in the welcoming office; sometimes the OG Geek Squad guys (before Best Buy bought them and had them drive VW New Beetles) would show up in vintage police cars and fire engines, which they used to actually drive to service calls. It was funny seeing those all parked along the road. :P
you gained a sub! the video is very informative, and i also love modems and retro tech overall. Love the vid! Keep it up, mate! :)
Also, you neglected to mention why "AT" commands (the bit pattern for "AT" has very useful properties) and that they're still in use for controlling things like WiFi chips and cellular modem chips. See Eric S Raymond's "Things Every Hacker Once Knew" for more on all that.
I recall in the late 80s in a computer shop hearing how someone was buying a modem. The shop assistant said: "It is controlled wïth normal AT-commands." The buyer then said: "I have only a PC."'
AT means "attention".
@@NotMarkKnopfler That may be true, but they could just as easily have chosen something like "CM" (Command) or "NO" (Notice) OR "CT" (Control) or come up with another thing that "AT" is short for.
To quote ESR's section on "AT":
What was not commonly known then is that the "AT" prefix had a helpful special property. That bit sequence (1+0 1000 0010 1+0 0010 1010 1+, where the plus suffix indicates one or more repetitions of the preceding bit) has a shape that makes it as easy as possible for a receiver to recognize it even if the receiver doesn’t know the transmit-line speed; this, in turn, makes it possible to automatically synchronize to that speed.
Ironically enough when 56K started becoming standard the PCs and manufacturers of expansion cards loved making cheap ass WinModems that used software and robbed your PC of performance.
A serial port connected or hardware modem was always the best. Especially those of us still using dialup after the year 2000.
16th a
Oh God yes.. Winmodems were the worst.
Thanks for putting this all together, did enjoy watching it!
Like many others, I was in at the 300baud period (I had an acoustic coupler). I love the whole history and am glad to have lived through it. Thanks for the great video. Cheers. Lee
My beloved budgie (A German whistling one, called Butschie, R.I.P. my friend) used to imitate the V.32 carrier negotiation phase.
I bet he had insights in that topic that we will never comprehend. Hehehe
Thanks for the great video, RetroBytes! :)
Awesome video! Dial-up ISP's were my only choice in my rural part of America even into broadband era as cable companies didn't want to touch the little section of zip code I lived in and telcoms couldn't offer DSL because I was too far from a phone exchange. Needless to say I had dial-up until 2010 believe it or not, when my local power company began to offer broadband from the nearest large city out to the country for us. Quite a learning curve but it's led me to have a special appreciation for dial-up and pots telephone service!
There are still areas without broadband, I am still stuck on terrible DSL too far from the exchange I think they provide out of pity. 2mb down, 0.3up on a good day. At least its not dialup.
Bringing back tons of memories...
Starting to work the Telex machine was still functional. Then BTX (Bildschirmtext, "screen text", I'm from Austria) with a 300/75 bd acoustic coupler came. My first expereience with BBS were made with a 1200 bd modem, where even for my employers bill I felt uncomfortable to download a one megabyte file (a list of training programs), needing a one hour long distance call...
The first modem I owned myself was a super fast 2400 bd modem, when CompuServe offered local dial-in phone numbers.
Several modem generations later, I switched to ISDN, so with two data channels the telephone wasn'd blocked.
With ISDN available I also set up a NT 3.51 server (including call back feature) in the office to do some remote work, today it would be called home office... ;-)
Finally DSL with a whooping 786 kbit/s moved in at home.
Today it's a 300 Mbit/s cable connection.
Oh, and yes, most of the old equipment can still be found in several boxes... :-)
We didn't have free local calls in the UK at the time and I believe this was one of the most overlooked causes of us running behind the USA in getting the Internet to the pubic and cheap home hosting. Great video as always. Really so interesting even for someone who was there during the whole history, thank goodness for broadband.
I remember dialing in to the public library's card catalog system. Absolutely fascinating to remember these old times!
Just wanted to say that was really enjoyable to watch as somebody who grew up with dial up and then worked in network engineering for a few years. At the time just before Freeserve appeared I was working for Time Computers up in Lancashire who had their own ISP and for a large number of people was both their first PC and first internet experience.
Time Computers actually locked their customers into their own ISP by hardware locking the computer modem into Time's ISP by ensuring theirs was the only number it could dial. We got so many complaints about this when Freeserve appeared I'm honestly shocked they weren't taken to court over it.
Was really interesting to see the story of how certain ISPs became the business services companies they are now (cough Zen cough). Zen actually supply our leased line now as well as some IT services so they do still dabble in internet on the side.
Oh wow this brings back memories. I worked at a Dutch IT company from19 95 till 2003. We were early in the internet technology and build ISP’s pop locations as well as connected lager companies and ministries to the internet.
Early pops were build using Cisco routers with octo serial cables connected to USrobotics modems. Radius was used to authenticate people dialing in.
I was at 2/3 of your episode and I maws wondering if the portmasters would show up. And there they were…
We sold and installed dozens of these things. iSDN was big in holland and a single iSDN-30 would allow up to 30 iSDN calls or 30 analogue in any mix. Yes the chassis was expensive but it cleared a lot of expensive rack space. And Cisco’s equivalent chassis version was 3x the price. And that was an empty unpopulated rack.
Great memories at a great innovative and exciting time…
I love your documentary videos about technology, they are very good, I don't even notice the time passing.
Having worked on those modems at USRobotics back in the 90's it was so fun to see those USRobotics modems. I still get a warm & fuzzy feelings when I hear them train. The USR modems will work fine on a dry-line. Use ATO to originate the call and ATA to answer the call on the dry-line (without the TSLS line simulator). I'm sharing this video in our USRobotics Alumini group. Infact they will connect directly to itself with the AT command AT&T1 (analog loopback). Thank you for the nostalgia.
Excellent episode Mr. Retro. It brought back memories.
Congratulations on the sponsored video. I really really love the one, because I learned Unix & Linux when I started with computers and ended working at ISP's in the mid/late 90's (I still work for ISP's) because they were the biggest uses of Unix/Linux at the time, and we used to do all of this stuff, starting with a bunch of Linux servers having 32 courier modems hanging out the back of each box, using CHAP & PAM to manage connections and auth, and adding bsd compression on the pppd and spending a fortune upgrading to 56k V.90 modems and then later rack mount modems and ISDN "modems", and analogue leased lines and by then I was using RADIUS with different realms in usernames for auth, but lightning would devastate a POP and it was expensive to maintain, and by then our telecoms company had their own POP's that they would "lease" to you and point the RADIUS Realm to your server and you just paid for the data used, like $0.02c per Gb or something and that was so much cheaper than buying a PABX and servers and modems and ups and cisco routers for the breakout on x.21 lines (and we set up FAME some times) and setting it all up and maintaining it. Thank you for this, and all your video's, they awesome. (Are you going to make an IRC video some time?)
Thanks Rachael, we where very lucky with never losing any modems to lighting strikes. I do know some who lost nearly half theirs to one lighting strike to their building. IRC is definitely on my list as is Usenet and Gopher.
@@RetroBytesUK wow, Gopher! I used that in a high school summer enrichment program way back in 1994.
I worked for a dial-up isp. We had both rack mount modem arrays (later on when they became cheaper, and server room rack space more expensive), but mostly endless modems set on shelves, often haggled for on local BBSs. We ran BSD back then, freebsd and linux came later. Our biggest competitor was a free, but inferior service through the local university's VAX/VMS system which had a weird psudeo-shell. Man I miss gopher. I still remember having to limit then shut down usenet, and a couple other services. I loved the day we finally moved to sDSL, I could stream my mp3's from my home server on any decent connection. I lived on the border of an area that got free calls to both local area codes and operated a BBS bridge for a while, so people from one state could call the other for free, giving them more options and the sysops more exposure. I still remember hunting down old crossbar exchanges before the 3dss switchover, for... reasons. IIRC lower baudrates will work okayish on low latency IP telephony/sip at lower rates, but do use the best error correction available to you and expect sub-optimal response. ISDN was just 128k iirc, hardly worth the extra expense until you needed the full T1.
My father used to bring home one of those acoustic coupler modems and a portable teletype to do end of quarter reports from home instead of staying at work all night. And I worked for a mom-and-pop system integrator and ISP in the mid-90's setting up all this stuff and more - sooooo many things I had forgotten about.
Damn, this was such a trip down memory lane.
I worked in the industry in the 90's
So I knew all of these things, and some old memories got renewed.
Thank you so much for this video, really loved it. Well well skilled and well explained.
Alot of medical monitoring equipment relied on the always available PSTN connection for life and death. Worked support and dealt with a couple of very distraught people who relied on it, when we were doing upgrades to voip and that stuff stopped working.
As an ex admin of company using PBX (based on asterisk) I just loved to hear you talking about modems. But as for PRI type - it was 30 data channels, 1 control channel and 1 synchronization channel. And by connecting multiple E1s (or T1s), you could use all additional control channels as regular data (so 2 E1s is 61 data and 1 signal). Thanks for another great video :)
I should have said twice the band width for the control channel, as that was the case for more or less every ISDN pri deployment.
Great!... yes, I remember doing that in 1995, and I'm happy to say that Zen is still alive and well 27 years later. Thanks for the video - brought back memories!
Oh you gave me some chills with some of those brands & logos there! The very mention of Winsock was enough to give me a waking nightmare. After living with early Windows & DOS for so long, the ease of use you got with W95 is now often overlooked - built-in DUN & Winsock? Luxury :P I was a Demon customer - their usenet servers were fantastic!
Nice mention of Demon Internet. I used to work there, starting back in the days when the racks of modems were just individual modems with RS232 connections to individual phone lines to individual telephone master sockets. The modems were too close together and overheated. Solution was to space them on the shelves above each other with yoghurt pots. Eventually, rack-mount modems came, and then Ascend MAX and TNT boxes which were a lot tidier install and easier to manage in bulk.
As a member of technical staff to provide on-call service, we hooked up was was likely to be some of Britain's first DSL lines using 'baseband' bare copper wire service from BT. 2Mbit/s symmetric at home in 1996 was brilliant, and years before BT was offering any DSL to any customer. Many of the on-call staff moved house into the same exchange area to be able to get this service.
I'm rather proud of the small part I played in taking the Internet from a research project to an everyday thing, working with a bunch of highly competent workmates.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Back in the late1990's we shared a dialup connection on our home LAN. Back then internet sites were not so graphics heavy so it actually worked out pretty well.
In 2021 we were able to switch from DSL/POTS to fiber internet and telephone. I agree about the issue of needing local power for VoIP. A good thing about PON (passive optical network) is it does not require outside plant power. So as long as the ISP and customer are able to maintain power life if good. At least on this side of the pond that is something that is stressed when copper landlines are converted to fiber. Less well know to most folks is the limited power backup provisions of the Cable TV network and local cell towers.
I got my start at a little ISP outside of Boston, MA USA called The Internect Connection aka iCi.... starting out with Livingston Portmasters... best of times. Thanks for a little walk down memory lane.
the thing about the VOIP phones not working during power outages is solved here in the US by requiring voip modems (or rather cable modems with voip built in) also have battery backup that will typically last a week under no-power.