Why was the modem down? Let us count the ways. And phone lines Welcome again to On-Call, our regular reader-contributed tales of the jobs they've been asked to do at unpleasant hours of the day or night, in out-of-the-way places or under otherwise ridiculous circumstances. This week, reader Jean-Marc brings us a memory from 1998, when he worked as “a sysadmin looking after a network of …
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Don't knock it. In 1982 or so I had a Jupiter Ace Forth-based "computer". Actually it was a very clever design put in a cheap plastic case with the usual dead-flesh keys of the 80s, before we found ways of making keyboards for a quid. But I digress.
I wrote a program that allowed me to whistle morse code from across the room, and convert it to text on the fly. My mates were extremely impressed, because nobody had seen anything like that before. I had never even seen a modem, not that I'd have known what to do with it anyway.
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Funnily enough, not so distant for me. I still even have the old Maestro Executive 144 modem I used to use as a primary internet connection.
And yes, I have in fact used it this century: for testing configuration of UUCP for a coal train weighbridge system. We were replacing crusty old SCO OpenServer systems with Ubuntu Linux, and this was the closest I had to the Netcomms that the company used (running at 1200 bps, because the phone lines out west are REALLY crap).
I had it dialling into another modem attached to the server via our phone system internally. Still works.
Later we hope to use some technology from this century: perhaps something SSH-based over 3G. (UUCP over SSH isn't too difficult.)
I was on a gig in Japan and needed a link to a machine some distance away from Yokohama. We had direct facilities between the two sites so all should have been easy. What was needed was a basic modem nothing more nothing less, so I was provided with a pair of super smart PSTN devices. The problem was that the signalling between the true end points used a complex mixture of control signals, which the modem kept jumping in to read and respond to. It took ages to find all of the ways to turn the super smart into super dumb to make sure it worked in the application not always easy when you were 120 miles away from the far end with no on the ground support!
dialing into an ISP was easy.
The hard trick was correctly configuring the modem to dial into a local data service node such as BT's Packet Switchstream so you could access online data services........each network required different modem settings and half the time the correct ones didn't work anyway
of the modem, you got so used to it you could tell by the tones roughly what speed your 56k (Hah!) device had finally connected at. I well remember leaving my machine connected overnight to download IE4 (about 25MB IIRC). I also remember an MS presentation on IE4 where they wouldn't answer the question as to why the upgrade didn't allow reconnections to start the download where it left off, apparently the suits couldn't comprehend a world where people weren't on DSL.
<oldfartmode>
I remember in the mid - 90's travelling, and collecting compuserve email using PSTN dial up.
Those nice little sets of plugs, complete with screwdriver, leads and croc clips to connect directly to the phone line if you didn't have a compatible plug.
The worst was trying to collect email from Taiwan - I'm not sure what the delays were, but it was horrifically slow. Using a credit card directly to pay for the phone call made the dial up string enormously long.
Things improved with Nokia mobile phones with wired connection to the laptop - also late 90's.
</oldfartmode>
I was fairly early into my IT career having moved from electronics engineering.
One of the jobs I was sent to do was for a large bank/credit card company to set up this really fancy video conferencing camera.
They picked me to do it because it came with things like a little mixing deck and could face track and it was "well kind of like electronics".
I got it all set up and plugged into the ISDN line that had been run into the conference room. Checked it with a call to the company that provided it and got the job signed off and went home.
Next morning I had a call from my manager - apparently the director who first tried to use it was fuming that she couldn't connect so I was made to haul ass back down to put it right.
Got there...checked it... worked.
Tracked the director down - eventually. She was far too busy to interact with a low level pleb like me and showed her it working.
Anyway I was about to leave when she called me back as it wasn't working again. A bit of faffing around showed that she shared the ISDN line - they themselves had run some kind of extension from it. The software she had on her laptop used the ISDN line to do some kind of work and of course when she was using it, the video conferencing system couldn't.
And the horrid cow tried to blame me for not using the right line that her own staff had put in.
Reminds me of sitting outside my tent in the middle of a field at a rally doing the month end processing (it was that long ago when such things still had to be done). Had to use the cable connection between the phone and laptop as it was too sunny for IrDA to work.
Everyone thought I was mad but it made the difference between getting stuck in to the beer late morning and having a 3 hour round trip plus 2 hours work time to go in to the office, and a 9600bps connection was fine for the TN5250 terminal emulator.
Glen
Unless of course, you were too cheap to buy a proper serial-connected one and bought a "winmodem" instead.
USB or Serial? RS323 is still far less robust when it goes through a USB adapter. If you want to come into the modern world, Serial ATA anyone? Serial-Attached-SCSI? (Serial) Thunderbolt (hmm multiple 10G lanes)? or would you like USB? USB is great for mice and keyboards and webcams. It kinda works for portable disks - if anyone still does that sort of thing.
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I still have a practically unused Roland A3 flatbed plotter here which connects via RS232 (not 323 :) ) or Centronics. Don't have anything to connect it too, though, so I plan to bring it along for the Computer museum when I go to London again (it's certain to create excess baggage charges, this thing was made with real steel)...
Okay, this is from 2009, so maybe you've already seen it - still a good start for the weekend:
1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem
I have suggested it elsewhere (BoingBoing) before: we should start calling this sort of stuff 'Transistorpunk'.
When I was in the mainframe business, we made use of dial up modems
It started with a few Paradigm FDX2400 modems on a shelf to allow data capture staff to work from home..
They would either connect via their PC's serial port, or we'd happily provide a "dumb terminal" to those who didn't have a PC - in those days, RS232 ASCII FIFO menus were leading edge..
It also got expensive as we had to pay the remote workers; phone bills and many didn't have itemised billing... so we could have been paying for private calls too..
Enter the Octocom Modems, rack mount card type units with a dial-me, connect, verify and I will call you back configuration...
These were great and fast at 9600BPS with a unified management interface and it lowered our phone bill reimbursement costs greatly.
We never bothered to exceed 9600BPS for remote workers because our menus were ASCII based, so as modem speeds improved, only those of us who accessed IOL, BBS systems and undertook remote system admin needed 14.4K+
Today the modem is a relic, but I recall how we were blown away by 19.2K speeds, then finally 56K, before companies started making "double barrel" modem products that had two modems in one box and required two phone lines...
The modem, gone, but never forgotten and certainly not missed....
The modem, gone, but never forgotten and certainly not missed....
If you live in Norfolk, it aint gone nor forgotten
My mother still has only dial up because she's more than 4Km from the exchange
It's one of the reasons the "agriculture online" project is failing for Farmers
I'm actually thinking of buying a modem. We have appalling broadband at home - it struggles to stream 64kbps internet radio at weekends and about once a month drops out for a few hours. Our new router/firewall has a modem fallover port. Do those 0845 1p per minute dial-up services still exist?
That's cute. You think you're going to get any kind of modern browsing or streaming done whatsoever over such lines.
If you can't stream 64kbps with the background traffic, what makes you think that V92 at 56kbps, with higher latency and longer resyncs every time there's a tiny audible blip on the line is going to be any better?
Look into less mainstream alternatives or forget it. At best, you want an ADSL/VDSL bonding/failover router that can run on two phone lines (yes, you would have to pay to put a new one in). But anything involving modems on analogue lines was replaced years ago. Even industrial control has moved on to 3G, wireless, -over-IP, etc.
I wouldn't waste your money for even a test dial-up. Even UK2.net don't advertise their analogue ISP any more, so presumably that's dead.
My favourite when someone is bugging me goes along the nearest possible lines to:
"I can't get on the helpdesk" - "No problem, just file a ticket."
"I can't get my inbox" - "No problem, can you just shoot me a quick email so I know what mailbox I'm looking at."
"I can't get online" - "Ah, if you go to our website we have an FAQ for that"
It's amazing how often people fall for it if you word things carefully.
Back in the day (probably about the turn of the century) I was doing some work experience at a PC repair workshop. It was two weeks of tinkering and I learned a lot. Especially after the thunderstorm...
Basically, a large thunderstorm rolled in across the local area one night, and for the next four days the most common job that came in was for blown modems. You could actually see the scorch marks on some of the boards. Usual rate for a V90 internal modem at the time was something like £60 including fitting (except for one poor bloke with a compaq that used an odd half-height card which was something like £70 on its own). I don't think we saw any dead motherboards, but of course it would have been possible.
At least with a DSL Modem/router the unit was usually external so when it went bang it didn't kill anything else.
Used to do tech support at Compuserve as my first job out of school. Everyone's favourite line when they couldn't fix it was: "Right, well that should be ok now. If you can just hang up and try again.", thus forcing the poor customer to get off the line, find out it still didn't work and then call back back and sit in another 45 minute queue to get through to someone else. Hopefully someone else in a different call centre.
Then of course the worst line to hear in reply was: "No need, I've got a second line for the modem." as dreams of getting a lunch break and keeping your call time under the allocated 6 minutes disappeared...
The Register needs to track down one of the techs who had to go around visiting the exchange PoPs in the 90s swapping out the modems. I met a guy once that said it was like painting the Forth Bridge, he'd finish the upgrade cycle and then some fool would invent a better coding scheme or increase the density of the modem racks and he'd have to go around doing it all again.
If no one puts their hands up I could track said fellow down, he works in a reasonably senior position at a service provider now.
As someone who has moved a lot between countries (they kept finding me, cough) I had to deal with the countless ways in which local phone companies tried to prevent non-local (read: far cheaper) equipment being plugged in. One of those tricks was to use the outer wires on a RJ11 terminated cable instead of the inner ones, but it's a long list. In the end I wired up a cable with two croc clamps, which came in handy when I had to travel a lot. All I needed was this croc wire and a screw driver, worked everywhere.
As for use, one of the games we used to play was uploading a very popular file to the BBS and watch spongers (people who only download and never upload, thus disturbing the cosmic balance :) ) start to download it. This was in the time before Zmodem, so there was no resume function. It was thus fun to cut the connection just before the last few bytes were downloaded so they had to do it all again. Some needed a couple of events like that before they worked out they were not welcome..
Ah, those were the days.. Anyone remember BinkleyTerm?
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