The small ISP I work for recently acquired a network where the main core was in a back room of a local computer store, which was next to a medium sized CO. That back room also used to be the main POP for the dialup ISP that the computer store ran, before being acquired by a larger local ISP. Some of the routers in the network we got still had references to the old dialup ISP in it. Funnily enough, it also included some old Compaq servers that were similar to what was in your abandoned ISP setup... Which promptly had their services migrated to new hardware. Those old servers were SUPER heavy and power hungry.
Well, at least one big ISP around here still uses some reverse DNS names with "dial-up" in it, despite the IPs now being used in anything from LTE and 5G to fiber.
@evefavretto I have noticed this on AT&T wireless. The host name for the CGNAT'ed public IP has "dial" in it. Only in certain areas though. The rest are all mycingular hostnames.
@@evefavretto i was reminded of the reverse DNS names for two ISPs where I live, as those names reference brand names they used for their Internet services back in the days of, in the case of the first ISP, dial-up and ADSL, and in the case of the other, DOCSIS 1.0 cable internet. The first ISP discontinued their brand name in the mid-2000s, and the second ISP discontinued theirs in around the late 2000s or early 2010s.
I was the sysadmin for a small ISP in Washington State in 1996 - towards the end of my tenure, we ended up with a USR Total Control Net Server. It used a pair of PRI circuits to deliver 56K service. Amazing little box and a joy to work on. I sometimes miss that job, but then I'm reminded of all the stress and anger it engendered - mostly due to US West's shenannigans (We placed over 41 circuit orders - not one was on time or correct). I miss being cursed at for being a "low ping bastard" while playing Quake clan matches while parked atop a T1. 🤣 Mostly good times. :)
Haha. There was a young tech group at the local computer shop/ISP here in my area. We would go there to learn and were given PCs and access to their Dual T1 network. It was kids in a candy store. Think being the only "low ping bastard" was bad? Try all eight of us hitting a Quake server all sitting at like 30 ping. Amazing how fast we could clear a server out.
I miss dialing into the Teflon Rose BBS in Virginia. I asked the BBS guy if I could visit and see his setup. The guy was amazing! HE had over 80 telephone lines dropped into his house and using those foldable lunch tables had over 80 modems up and running and it was so cool to listen to the ambiance of everything running watching him sit down to administer account. I was impressed.
I worked at the largest dialup ISP in Nebraska around 2000. We had so many modems in many locations. At our main office it was a staggering number of them. We took the case off US Robotics modems and rack mounted them standing up. Then mounted them directly over the portmasters. This saved a lot of space but didn't solve the cable nightmare. Many zip ties were used to manage the cables. In our smaller locations they would tend to be housed in a local computer store or the like and took up a shelf. A portmaster with a bunch of loose modems. But, these locations often only had 25-100 modems each. A few smaller towns only had a dozen. It all came down to the law of averages. If utilization was high, we would add more modems to a location. In other locations we had something else that was entirely digital. It was also a portmaster of sorts, but with 48 modems built in. Those were the best kind as you could reboot it as a whole to clear issues. I don't remember what the model number was as that's been many years ago. Anyway, one of my jobs was to care for the modems. This involved writing software to scan every modem we controlled and look for anything unusual. Be it users that had been connected for more than 12 hours, or modems that were in stuck states. I wrote the software in such a way that it would telnet in to each of them, make a report and then another script that would take that report and take various actions to try to fix the modems in odd states. Often this involved having my script issue at commands to reset the modem in question. Then, I would re-run the first script and the report would give me a much smaller list of problem modems. I'd then have to call whatever location had have them physical reset the modems. I don't even remember how many thousands of modems we had. It was a huge number. Though, as DSL, Cable internet and such took off the company slowly failed. It's a sad story, and I left before total failure. But, it was a fun ride.
You guys are amazing. You have managed to create one of the most informative and at the same time entertaining channels about old network equipment and technologies.
No clue how I got here.... flashbacks to 1997-ish when I owned an ISP in Chicago. We had almost 100 of these fully stocked and fully deployed. Yes, we replaced I cant tell you how many portmasters and physical modems with these units. Great flashback to the past.
Excellent presentation. Thank you. I had one of those Multitech chassis with 12 modems hooked up to a Win 2000 server up until just a few years ago. I always liked the higher end Multitech modems. In the end, it was just an emergency backup to get in if the fiber internet went down. That setup was helpful more than once as a backup into the network. Love seeing folks being interested in this stuff.
Cool stuff! Thanks for making the this video. In the 1990s and early 2000s I was a co-owner and chief network engineer of a regional ISP. We started out with Livingston Portmasters for dial-up and upgraded to a dozen or so Total Control when the 56k standard came in. I loved the Total Control units, the totally delivered on simplified management and increase reliability. When a modem (or analog phone line) went bad using the Portmaster /w external modem setup it was a nightmare to find. Dial-up customer would report an intermittent "ring-no-answer" condition. That kind of problem basically didn't happen on Total Control. I recall a DSP card went bad once but it was obvious what card it was. The two T1 ports on the back came in handy. We go no documentation on how to get them to work, but I fiddled with them and eventually got them to work. Seeing your video it sounds like they were intended to be upstream connections to a main data center when using a Total Control in a remote POP, which I find very interesting given the lack of documentation. We had Cisco routers at all POPs (installed in the postmaster era) which were the gateways for the Total Control. So, we used the T1 ports on the back of the Total Control to connect T1s we sold to customers. Cisco routers cost a couple grand per port so leveraging the T1 ports on the Total Control was a welcome cost reduction.
I remember working on these back in the 90s for an ISP and also a major corporation who had its own dial up service. Back then USR had its own standard called X2 and it competed with Kflex 56. If you wanted to use X2 you had to dial into a 3Com/USR bank and you had to be using a 3Com or USR modem at home that was also capable of X2. Wow this brings back many memories in dormant brain cells! Thanks for sharing
That thing is awesome. It's amazing to think of the sheer amount of... stuff... that was just abandoned in the late 90s/early 00s. All of that explosive growth translated to shelves, racks and presumably entire buildings full of modems and related equipment towards the end of the dialup era. It must have been a huge amount of e-waste on a global scale, as broadband services rolled out all of this stuff suddenly became worthless and needed to go.
Plus the adoption of virtualization. Sooo many bare metal boxes were thrown to the curb in the late mid to late 2000's/early 2010's. Must have been a wild time.
I love watching these videos. I was a kid when we got dial up internet in the early 90's. Now today we operate a cable/wireless/fiber ISP and the history of all this is great!
I'm sure you've already got this figured out, but if you need a quick and dirty solution for T1 lines, any old Cisco router with a T1 card can emulate one. You just need to set the clock source to internal on the T1 controller. EDIT: Forgot to mention, you'll also need a T1 cross-over cable, which should be pretty easy to make.
We used 2500 Ciscos with the T1 cards in them. The telecoms gave them to us as subscribers to their service. The Sprint 2500 had dual T1/E1 cards in it, so we had a discussion with Sprint about tapping both card's potential. No soap. Not for another $1500/month.
Always wanted to play with one of those. The two ISPs I ran decided to just stick with "known good" gear and went from PM2s to PM3s. The PM3 seems less complicated than these USR boxes. T1s in, Ethernet out. Took calls from 300 to 56k as well as ISDN connections. Ah, the good times before telcos and cable took over.
I don't have to imagine the spaghetti mess. I worked at an ISP in the 90s. We had rows and rows of USR modems plugging into BSDi through octopus cables. We were, as I understand it, the first mutihomed dialup ISP. Those were the days...
Worked for an ISP in Canada back in the late 90s and early 2000s which had this. Thanks for the flashback, and elaborations that I was too naive to fully grasp at the time!
Was it a big one? I'm in MB and maybe I'm having a brain fart, but after BBSes faded away, I don't seem to remember there being any popular ISPs other than the incumbent telco, MTS. I was somewhat tech savvy, but nothing crazy, so maybe I was just oblivious.
Haha! What a blast from the past. I ran a bank of 2400 of these for Rutgers back in the mid-90s. They were actually pretty good, compared to the other banks we maintained. Hate to say, but I just tossed out a CD-ROM of TC install media last week as I was cleaning my office.
I was there when we finally removed the last of the tape library from the Hill Center DC, and when the newer protein folding clusters got moved in replacing the IBM blue gene. They still had the old sun Microsystems mainframes in there when I left.
I have one of these from the local dial-up ISP I used to work for. It was gifted to me after they sold off their customer base to another ISP sometime around 2010-ish. I believe it is populated with v.92 high performance cards, and I am looking forward to more installments so I can figure out how to put this beast to use today without going broke trying to order PRI from the local telco. ;)
Hey! I used to have a bunch of these in service back in the 90's when I helped run an ISP. Had a bunch of those SPARCs too being used as our servers. At one POP we had a cardboard box full of USR 33.6 Couriers because we didn't have room for a rack. I remember when 56k X2 came around and USR offered a firmware update to upgrade the Couriers. Holy crap, that took a long time to do as we had HUNDREDS of those things.
Oh wow, the nostalgia. I fondly remember my USR sportster 28.8 kpbs modems in high school. When I got to college, me and a few friends tried to start an ISP and we got a few nice little PCI cards that each could plug into a T1 and provide 24 v.90 ports for dialup in a Windows NT4 RAS server with I think it was dual Pentium II CPUs. I switched off the FCC 53,300 bps limit and we did manage to get a full 56,000 bps connection dialing in from home. Fun times.
Great report! I remember similar devices in the early 90s at 3M. We didn't call it IT then, it was Data Processing. I do recall banks of 2400 baud modems. Keep up the good work, and yes see if you can find an ISDN device too! They are cool.
Back in the early 2000s I ran an ISP. Started with a USR Total Control box.... but it wasn't compatible with the equipment that was in my local town that the local phone company used.... So I had to sell it and I went with Lucent PortMasters.... Those worked great.
Supported one of these as recently as around 2015. Worked on the side at a computer shop that used to be one of the largest ISP’s in West Virginia. Up until the owner passed away he demanded that we continued to provide dialup to the 5 customers we still had. Still had one PRI line coming into the shop and I would use the dialup as a last ditch remote in if something went wrong with our main router on our newer network.
Not only can I imagine it, I've seen it first hand. ('tho in an era before cameras were built into everything.) There was an ISP out near the mountains of NC (Blueridge Internet?) that had stacks of USR sportster desktop modems on window screens with an attic fan over each stack. That was the ISP. Yes, one or two would burn out (literally) per week. It was "cheaper" than the up front cost of a TC chassis. ("People are irrational and bad at math" - the cost of those modems could've bought a TC chassis every few years, not to mention the power and cooling savings.)
Ugh, don't get me started on false-economies that are cheaper in the short-term and vastly pricier in the medium-term. It seems entire countries run on that methodology now.
Fascinating look at the behind the scenes infrastructure that ran Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, and the like. I joined Lucent in the late 90’s and played with and supported ISDN, DS1 and DS3 connectivity for small and medium business PBXs. I’m really curious to learn how the 56k setup works as you needed to have a fully analog span between the user and the POP. Loving this series!
The 56k setup was digital on the isp side and the analog portion was only on the user end. By about 2001 there was higher upload speed v.92 but it reduced download speed, so for maximum download you had to force an analog 33.6 upload to get back to 56k download.
This doesn't work like that, the modems work on digitized voice channels carried over the TDM bus in the backplane. The T1 interface card supplies those digital voice channels from a digital T1 trunk. So really this box provides a way to transfer digital data using an elaborate analog encoding scheme over a digital carrier to the CO, where the actual analog channel would begin. Obviously this has huge overhead, this entire box is handling only around 1 megabit/s of data!
@@-szega got confused seeing "CO" all over these comments, only thinking "commanding officer", until I finally remembered while reading your one that Americans call exchanges "central offices"! So thank you, for providing enough context there haha.
I don't have to image. We had four FULL PortMaster 2e's. We started with Supra modems and then jumped to de-cased USR Sportsters in 5-pack zip-tied bundles. I think we ended up with a 20U (ish) Bay Networks terminal server.
Another wish list item you may want to look for is a 'Portmaster 3 series', its been too long to remember all of the details. but back in the late 90s we had them setup with full voice T1s and 24 modems internally, we ran those side by side with our racks of sportster v.92 modems on our Portmaster 2 units. I believe when they got to the 3 series, Lucent bought up Livingston.
I worked at an ISP in the Houston area from 1996-2000, and we had Ascend(later Lucent) Max for dialup connectivity. I think each one was 3U or 4U and I want to say they handled 2 PRIs each, and had 6 of them for around 300 simultaneous connections. Since they were pretty expensive, only a couple of the units had 56k capability, and the rest maxed out at 33.6. I lived far enough away from the CO that it didn't matter, as I could never get higher than a 26.4 connection even with a 56k modem. I had friends that worked at 2 other local ISPs and they also used Maxes for connectivity. I'm guessing they must have been cheaper than USR as all of these places were relatively small.
yep, I also worked for an ISP in the late 90's/early 2000's. we had Ascend/Lucent TNT's and later Lucent APX-8000's. the APX-8000's supported. The APX-8000 supported 4 DS-3's (~2700 ports/modems) per chassis.
I used to work in Tut Systems DSLAMS when out little startup in China in the pre ADSL days would pull fibre to buildings and then break out and sell SDSL services.
I worked breifly with an ISP in the 90's we used the Total Control and the PortMaster, that same one you had. my memories are spotty from the time, I feel like you'd run in to a better helper, but if it came down too it I'd be happy to help.
Back in the early 90's I ran a small BBS out of my house and had two lines and was on Fidonet. I had two USR Couriers, and ironically still have those two modems today. One of them is a demo/engineering sample with a gold plaque on it that its not for sale, that I got from USR as a free donation at the time. Those were the days! 👍😁 Things were the simple days!
Still have one of those old US Robotics modems, but no phone line. Remember seeing an early POP for an ISP, with a room full of modems there, all of them with spaghetti cording at the back, and the incoming lines being connected via Krone blocks direct to the cut in half phone cords for the modems, saving on buying sockets to wire them up. That was eventually replaced entirely with T1 lines and digital software.
I ran a 3COM Total Control chassis and a pair of Ascend 4048s at my tiny ISP back in the early 2000s. For some reason, USR modems always connected at a higher speed to the Ascends, and Lucent winmodems did better on the 3COM. I never could figure out why. I don't remember what happened to them after I sold the ISP. I think I sold the Ascends to another ISP who wanted them for spare parts, and the Total Control might have ended up in a dumpster. Nobody seemed to want it back then because the shift away from dial-up to DSL and cable was well underway and electronics recycling was unheard of. It was a real workhorse, though.
I worked for a small dialup ISP right out of high school in the 90s. We had Livingston portmasters and then later picked up some total controls. The modems connected to the portmasters were USR 33.6 modems, shucked out of their shells and placed int to purpose built racks with hangers to save space. Your story sounds like something right out of our 90s mom and pop ISP biz - The outfit I worked for filled the demand for internet connectivity all over the northsate, small towns that had plenty of customers but not enough to attract the larger ISPs. We partnered with other local business and put up little mini ISPs wherever we could. (Gott have that flat rate local calling rate!) Closets in beauty salons. Storage rooms in supermarkets, pizza joints, and even a community center. Small down dialup ISPs survived for longer than most because broadband reached those places last. I could see one of our old locations just being left in place, forgotten after dialup finally faded away.
V.EVERYTHING forever!!! Before we bought the Total Control units, I recall meeting with sales people from Ascend, Livingson, and all the other companies making 56k grear. I remember the US Robotics salesman pointing out that they had the best BLPD ratio of all digital modem appliances. Blinking-lights-per-dollar :-) I recall choosing Total Control because of Us Robotics reputation, the fact that their X2 56k tech seemed like it was becoming the dominant standard (versus K56flex used by the others), and the modularity of the Total Control was super appealing.
Some familiar equipment there, I worked with computer stores, BBSs and ISPs from the early 1990's. At one time, I had a USR Sportster on a dedicated line at the one ISP, and a matching one at home. Used that setup until I got a wireless connection for several times the speed of the modems. I went to work for the Wireless ISP, and upgraded my connection and equipment a few times over the years. Seems like we started out with Teletronics, then moved to Turbo Cell on RG-1000s and old Apple AirPorts on 2.4GHz, then some 3.6GHz gear, before moving to Ubiquiti. They had one customer on the old Turbo Cell system for years, as it was about a 50 mile hop to the one mountain top they could see. ISP had coverage into five counties when I left, and plans to expand.
I'd love to read more about this Turbo Cell long-distance wireless networking, but alas both Google and DDG are bringing-up nothing but totally useless results about LTE, wifi, and water treatment equipment called Turbo Cell. Is there anything else I could narrow-down the terms with? Like a standards number, or an originating company?
@@kaitlyn__L It was using 802.11b, but modified timing for the greater distance. It required the right kind of wireless card, basically Lucent, or whatever they were going by at the time. It required a license for each CPE device, and you ran a computer with the cards plugged in to it as your AP. We used a RADIUS system to allocate the bandwidth to each client, based on the MAC of the CPE device.The company that produced and sold it was Karlnet. Apparently YDI bought them back in 2004.
Having flashbacks.. Spent almost a decade running a large dial up ISP with Portmaster 3s, and Total Controls. There were later cards for the TCs that allowed for Quad PRIs, 92 modems *per slot*. I don't know if you could fill the entire thing with those, but I had a few running with 4 of the quad cards. Was sooo nice, until a card/slot ate shit, which happened a lot , those midplanes were really touchy. I think at the end we scrapped at least 50 of those chassis. The steel was probably worth a good buck. Portmaster3s were honestly our bread and butter though. 3U , 2 PRIs per chassis, but dirt cheap. $50 a pop , and that was 20 years ago. Had a memory leak in the software though which was annoying, but wasn't terrible.
You could load a TC with a DS3's worth of ports using those Quad PRI cards, along with a DS3 mux card. When they worked, they were OK replacements for the PM3 with much better rack density. They had OSPF issues, (as did the PM3s) that could be worked around, but the bigger problem was random hardware failure in the cards, modem cards would just die with no recovery method I ever found. (And trying to figure out if it was the NIC or NAC side that failed...) Add in the management software for them never making it past Win XP support and they were a royal PITA to support as time went on.
At one point we had somewhere around 20 of these units installed. Originally with quad modem cards and Netserver cards, then later HiperDSP and HiperARC cards. I still have one running along with an old install of TCM (Total Control Manager) in a VM we fire up to remotely reboot it when it starts misbehaving.
I remember testing these. We also tested X.2 with them. We got through quite a few of them too. The first ones came with a separate fan tray and you really do not want people to unplug it because it would baconate. "there's smoke coming out of the rack, should I turn it off?" When not incinierating themselves, they were really reliable. They went from 1 rack with 2 T.1's and 48 modems, to a T1/card while we were using them. I still have my free total control screwdriver too.
I helped build a dial-up ISP in Fort Wayne IN back in the day (96-98). we built it from 0 to about 1500 subscribers at its peak. We started out with boxes that had 16 ISA slots that we populated with 33.6 modem cards -- if memory serves we had 2 boxes at our main office and 1 in a branch office. Each office also had a Windows Server running RAS services. Then we upgraded to a 3Com TotalControl box in the main office with 2 PRI cards. If memory serves, the TotalControl didn't go through RAS, but routed directly after authenticating with a RADIUS server. EDIT: Oh and we definitely had our modem cards upgraded to the 56k firmware 😉 This probably wouldn't fly these days, but I remember getting tech support calls where the customer couldn't log into email and would swear they had their password right. So I'd do a trace on the session (all unecrypted of course) and see they had Caps Lock on or some such thing and gently suggest they open Notepad and try typing it there -- oh, it's typing all big letters 😲 Maybe you should try hitting that button with the light on the left of your keyboard until the light turns out.
My local nursing home used to have a dialup access system for doctors. They had one of these in the basement up until about 2002. At that point the copper phone lines were replaced by IP Softphones. Also the home had been purchased and the new owner didnt like the dialup system… I don’t blame them, it was a private number with a password but that was it.
It's cool seeing this old hardware power on and work again. Technology and the Internet was still in infancy when this stuff was state of the art. I'm pretty sure there are a couple locations right around the corner from me that used to host small dial-up ISPs. One location has what appears to be 80s/90s era Fiber Optic cable from the Bell Atlantic / NYNEX days going onto it. No idea if it's still in use today for some other purpose. Another location has an awfully big copper trunk going into it for being a Residential address.
I tried to start an ISP back in the early 90's in a little backwoods town here in New Mexico, but the local Telco refused to provide me with a T1 line to accomplish it. I had a 24 line setup with individual USR V.34 modems, and the resources to purchase a T1 router. I found out later that year, that they already had plans in the works for their own ISP, so it would have been a losing battle to try to compete with them.😜
I worked for Infinet who was a manufacturer of telecom switching equipment. ISDN, and various modems. Just before the company was fully integrated into Memotec, they came out with a similar product that had racks-mounted 56K modems. These modems used Motorola 68K chips and were fully redundant just like their other IDM product line. If a modem card died, the control-card would send a message to a console and out on the network to a remote operator. After getting laid-off from Infinet, I worked for a life insurance company that set up chatterbox PCs in their computer room to allow remote transactions from their satellite offices. Periodically, we had to reboot the set up due to the software running out of memory and crashing.
and while he was cleaning out the system, a banker and a loan officer named Patty Wac stopped by, and she asked what all the equipment was for, and the banker said to the loan officer, "its a Nic / Nac Patty Wac, give the man a loan, an ISP he does own"
What a flashback ... We had the portmasters ... trying to get them to do dynamic routing updates was such a pain ... we jumped for joy when they did triggered RIP updates... Motorola had a 19" rack mount cage that stored individual modem cards.. The migration to Cisco's was joyful - back when Cisco weren't the horrible mess that they have become.
TCI@home used these with DOCSIS cards installed to make a CMTS (cablemodem termination system). Too bad 3COM couldn't get it Cable Labs certified until about a year after we launched. IIRC there were 8 upstream cards (modem to headend) and one downstream card (headend to modem). Each upstream card had 2 ports but very quickly we had to redesign the coax network to only use one port on each upstream to handle the traffic. We finally replaced them with Cisco UBR 7200 CMTSs after 3COM couldn't quash the memory leaks and other bugs. Had far fewer CMTS problems after that...
The isp I worked at had numbers for 56k x2 that went to USR racks like yours and 56k flex that went to rockwell racks. Now I need to find the pictures of it. Such a cool place to work back then.
The ISP I worked for was an Ascend shop, but we eventually got some USR TCs via the company that eventually acquired us. I still preferred the Ascend gear, but I liked how crazy modular the USR TCs were. By the end of my ISP career we were operating Ascend (later acquired by Lucent) Max TNTs and Apex 8000s, which supported up to 672 and 2688 dialup connections respectively. I was really young and had no idea what I was doing most of the time, but we some how kept it all running. 😂
This is cool. And I'm sitting here thinking 'I can help test a dial up with my 2 1999 era laptops'. Then I remember that my home has no phone line. But I do have a 1998/9 era Compaq Armada (which did have many components replaced in Australia in 2002) running Win2K and a 1999 MacBook on OS9 that have modems. Both should still function.
Hi there, Found this very Interesting, a blast from the past.. I had a US robotics router, bought when my first house was outta zone for getting broadband and my ISP talked me into ISDN (2002 Nightmare from British Telecom, No better today)... anyway I used to have a separate PC with a NIC and NAC card along with a usRobotics Router *was a first perches on ebay lol*. anyway worked really well for 3 months. was fun to play with and learn but also since I had no net without it, a pain to look any information up. The good old days :P Thanks for the walk down memory lane :)
I worked for a small ISP in the late 90s. When I started they had a pair of closets full of modems stacked on top of each other. A few months later, though, they replaced that entire mess with a TotalControl chassis and a new RADIUS server.
Total Scrutinizer software was like a cheat code for troubleshooting dialup issues. These chassis were amazing for regional Australia, especially with a USR Courier or Maestro Woomera as the CPE
Oh god, these things were terrible. We had a couple of these before deploying Ascend boxes that were much easier to manage. The Total Control box was (as I recall) 3 independently managed systems in a box, which wasn't great. And it was clear that USR didn't really know much about operating channelized T-1 spans. I recall an episode where a remote loop got sent to the CSU in the Total Control rack, but there wasn't an obvious way to clear the loop locally, unless you reset the system which dropped all the calls on the OTHER T-1 board. Eventually at UUNET we migrated to a few hundred thousand modem ports of Ascend TNT-MAX boxes that took channelized DS-3 spans for 672 modems (or less if ISDN signaling) in a (very, very hot!) box that was like 8U high in a rack. These were pretty spiffy, with the major fault being side-to-side airflow for cooling. Yeah, good times! Great experience to have had in retrospect. Modem interoperability for V.90 modems was another thing to behold, too. There was quite a range of crappy modems in the consumer channels those days..
Motorola also made stellar modem racks which weren’t as popular due to costs but often were even better designed than the US Robotics modems. Early ISPs were often cheapskates but in critical applications we installed lots and lots of Motorola units.
I had one of these, unused, at my first job in London in 1997. We never quite got it going, and soon after, client VPN connections ruled the land. I have memories of trying so hard to get dial-in working, but I knew very little back then compared to now!
when will this channel hit on ISDN stuff? I never had that sort of connection, I went from dialup to a 1.5mbps cable connection back in 2001 - but i did see ISDN modems being sold and even services. I just think ISDN is fascinating, since it is kind of the precursor to DSL, and there were also ISDN/- DSL type connections.
Not really. I had all. I don't know, how ISDN worked in the US, Europe had first several versions and later on (when I came to ISDN) Euro-ISDN. ISDN, despite internally using concepts like ATMs behind the scenes at the telco level, in fact it was just a normal dial up connection like with a modem, but with different hardware, instant dialing and 64kbps without errors, which just made it far faster than the 56k modems... Of course, error correction was built in already, so there was nothing else than the 64k and two available channels which, because of the costs, near to nobody combined... DSL, on the other hand, is a completely own infrastructure running in parallel to the phone network (called POTS, plain old telephone service). Those networks were divided by the "splitter". The principle is still the same, the only difference became, that the splitter became integrated into the universal device, later on... I doubt, newer standards really use those old, slow POTS frequencies until today, as until today, you can get an Analogie telephone line in at least some large phone networks, despite VDSL250 is available on the curb... So ISDN was still classic dialup. But as back then, the phone networks still were based on ISDN / ATM, (A)DSL was based on ATM. As those components were damn expensive and Ethernet became the standard in telco networks, at VDSL, the emulating overhead had been thrown out and today a VDSL modem is nothing more than a bridge between Ethernet and VDSL to the curb and afterwards, it goes further with Ethernet again... In Germany, the ISP service usually resides on VLAN ID 7...
Oh, and to better show it on a customer level: Modems and ISDN used plain PPP (exceptions might have used SLIP) over modem or ISDN, just plain old serial communication. DSL had used PPPoA, PPP over ATM, which might have later been translated to Ethernet. As with VDSL, you have in fact only a media translator, you directly use PPPoE, PPP over Ethernet, for dialing in at your ISP...
@@compukiller2 well im in the USA , and while ISDN perhaps was not as common here as it was in Europe , it was certainly offered - and I only compared it to DSL as you had audio and data channels - hence you could use voice and data at the same time , like DSL - though again I do recall reading somewhere that at some point there was an ISDN-DSL . Also perhaps in Europe ISDN rates were also dirt cheap maybe? Since it was so common there - again yes it was offered here too in the USA , but the BRI of ISDN was out of reach for everyone, unless you had a very specific need for it, and could get it - and you did also have bonded ISDNs , multiple 64k connections reaching up to a blistering 384kbps or even almost 500kbps .
ISDN in the home was a very brief thing in the UK but in some countries I believe it was available and widespread a little earlier. I seem to remember 1998-2001 being the era it was semi-common here, it was marketed as "BT Home Highway" and was popular with gamers before Cable and later ADSL became available due to the latency advantage. I think it was quite expensive however and I don't believe any unmetered services ever existed but could be wrong there, I remember people who had it would only rarely connect both 64k channels at once (for faster downloads) due to the extra cost of doing so.
Back in the later part of the 90s I installed (5) US Robotics Total Control Hubs for my employer who used them to allow stores to connect remotely into the AS/400 system. I had a small RADIUS server that did the authentication. I configured each T1 as B8ZS to give the maximum amount of data for each channel a store could connect to. Sadly, we were sold before this ever became the production system. 😞
I think it's important to mention that during the evolution of modems they stopped being end to end analog connections. That's why this level of integration is even possible. The customer modem basically twittered analogue to a modem in a Telco very close to the customer and the rest ran ISDN style on the digital network of the phone provider.
A PRI will only give you access to 46 modems, as a PRI is 23B(bearer)+D(data for circuit management). You'll need to configure/use it with T1 supertrunks (24 digital lines per T1) to use all 48. It shouldn't be hard to find equipment to interface the T1 supertrunk to analog, if you don't have a PBX that handles supertrunks. I used to admin a total control for a small ISP in central California from 1997 through 2006 or so. Very reliable piece of hardware.
47 if the software on the TC isn't stupid. One D channel can support multiple PRIs worth of B channels. The main limitations being that all the PRIs in the group have to be homed on the same switch and you have to have enough D channels to handle whatever amount of Q931 you're trying to pass. If your call times are stupid short you may barely be able to live with 1D per PRI. If they're stupidly long you may be able to get away with 1D for an entire DS3's worth of PRIs, assuming the telco can support that large of a group.
I have 3 Courier v.Everything and 1 Courier sysop dual-standard with the not for sale plate on it. I had a pair of 1st gen Sportsters but always preferred the Couriers. We used a pair of 24port(?) Shiva LANRovers at work before our remote offices could get broadband.
The fun part of being able to provide 56k/V.90/V.92 was that you needed a PRI line from the phone company to be able to provide that kind of speed over dialup. The number of digital to analog conversions by the phone company was limited, i believe just to a single conversion. The connection at the PRI is purely digital, but gets converted to analog at (I believe) the customer's CO. I worked for an old dialup ISP back in the early 00's. We used Ascend/Lucent MAX servers to provide the dialup access.
I had dial up at my parents until around 2010 ish, eventually were able to wireless ( expensive and download limit of 5gb a month ) the main reason we couldn't get ADSL was because of pair gained lines, never heard of that term before and hardly ever talked about especially very limited information about it. Because we live in a cul-de-sac, and on the other side was brand new housing, there weren't any new phone lines, so they used ours because it was the last in the box, and split it to make more lines, this effectively half our dialup speed 56.6k down to 28.8k, and were never able to get ADSL because of that.
No 'Total Control' here, we used Portmasters in 1993... 100 incoming POTs 2500 users at what was then "Navicom Internet Services" in Salem, Oregon... Good luck with the "Total"...
Worked at a small ISP in 96 .. few of those Livingston 2e filled out completely with external modems.. all connected with DB25 cables. Spaghetti mess!! Great blinky light show though!
Ah the portmaster 2e... brings back memories. Not used for a modembank but as a cheap serial console server for servers. When terms like SDN, cloud and CDN were already working but the business guys didn't know about it for another decade. At that time it was COTS servers and fully software configurable network topology. Filling your rack with cheap servers and connecting it to switches, and serial port servers like the portmaster, and be done with it and later design the network and software architecture from the desk. That's about 25 years ago.
Ah, cyclades, great stuff, if it wasn't for the numerous memory and storage leaks. But that was already a decade later than the portmaster. When BMC's finally got introduced (PC server hardware sucks, thanks to wanting to serve Microsoft), we were really having a hard time deciding if it was worth the cost of a switch port. Eventually we replaced the cyclade with a overbooked switches for the OOB management of the servers, while having the front of the servers hooked up to non-overbooked switches. But really nothing has changed in the last 25 years, except that switches got better and more cheap, and PC-servers like supermicro finally became on par with serial console as primary servers like the original sun Sparcs.
Oh I miss dial-up. I ran a couple Ascend Max TNTs until dial-up was nearly dead in our area. I managed to snag an upgrade to support V.92 right at the end, but none of the few users left were able to negotiate much above 28.8 so I never saw it get any use.
I’ve always been very curious about the beginnings of home internet access. Very interesting to see that companies setup PoPs anywhere when they could and made sense. How would all this connect upstream? Back via AT&T via some leased line (T1/T3?) back to PSINet? And where was that?
Yeah, it's kind of funny how we've started to think of servers as needing all this dedicated hardware around them like a telephone exchange or electrical substation. But back then it was basically just any computer you wanted to connect to a spare phone line. All sorts of small businesses shoved an old, spare, computer in a corner with an old, spare, modem and used it as their own personal dialup server. This was actually a pretty fancy rack by comparison, even though it was just in some cupboard in a gym!
Some DialStar sysadmin from the 90's is watching in horror as the vehicle upon which they rode into a revolution is dismantled for views. Another DialStar sysadmin from the 00's is watching with popcorn as the legacy burden that could never quite go away finally becomes someone else's problem.
I wish I would have found this video sooner, as the company I work for recently scrapped 2 of the chassis each loaded with 11 of the DSP cards, each with a Access Router Card & Network Mgt. Card. I would have found someway to get them to you guys!
We had a bunch of these for the regional ISP I helped start. I loved the Hiper cards, though. Since I didn't like using Windows to administrate these, we did 95% of the administration via command line and I wrote up scripts that used SNMP to pluck the LED statuses off the front and generate images that could be served up by a webserver. The code was out on the internet for years, but I don't know if it's still out there. I probably have a copy of it, but I'd never find it. It's a shame, but later I started work on a live Java app to grab the info, but got side tracked and it never got far.
I think I still have an old TC unit floating around my house from a small ISP I used to own in WI. Those things were awesome. I was thrilled to dump the PortMaster 3 I had started it with - the PM3 was just too unreliable on connection quality compared to the TC in the area I was at (channelized T1 at the office, no one in the area wanted ISDN so didn't see a point at the time getting PRI T1s). Not sure if it had to do with the quality of the rural phone lines at the client houses or what, but the PM3 just couldn't maintain a good connection to my clients.
Ah the good old days, I remember wrangling some of these into racks when I worked at an ISP ~1994/1995. Get a few of these together, and you'll need ear protection, these things are *loud* AF with that fan tray.
Oh I have the Cisco version of this (AS5300) that is currently configured for 4 T1s and 120 modems. Its wild that the T1 is the slowest network link in my house.
Cool! I remember going from the 4-port cards to the HiPer DSP cards in my ISP business so many years ago. I think I was up to 5 of them at one time. It definitely was a learning curve, but not huge. I wonder if the company that I sold Forbin to (and just retired from!) still has those laying around. I'll check for you.
The small ISP I work for recently acquired a network where the main core was in a back room of a local computer store, which was next to a medium sized CO. That back room also used to be the main POP for the dialup ISP that the computer store ran, before being acquired by a larger local ISP. Some of the routers in the network we got still had references to the old dialup ISP in it. Funnily enough, it also included some old Compaq servers that were similar to what was in your abandoned ISP setup... Which promptly had their services migrated to new hardware. Those old servers were SUPER heavy and power hungry.
Well, at least one big ISP around here still uses some reverse DNS names with "dial-up" in it, despite the IPs now being used in anything from LTE and 5G to fiber.
Was it one of the beige Compaq servers like in this video? If it is, if you’re willing to sell it I am looking for one.
@@2dfx There were two grey ML530 G2, unfortunately I recycled them since we didn't have room to store them and none of us wanted to take them home.
@evefavretto I have noticed this on AT&T wireless. The host name for the CGNAT'ed public IP has "dial" in it. Only in certain areas though. The rest are all mycingular hostnames.
@@evefavretto
i was reminded of the reverse DNS names for two ISPs where I live, as those names reference brand names they used for their Internet services back in the days of, in the case of the first ISP, dial-up and ADSL, and in the case of the other, DOCSIS 1.0 cable internet. The first ISP discontinued their brand name in the mid-2000s, and the second ISP discontinued theirs in around the late 2000s or early 2010s.
I was the sysadmin for a small ISP in Washington State in 1996 - towards the end of my tenure, we ended up with a USR Total Control Net Server. It used a pair of PRI circuits to deliver 56K service. Amazing little box and a joy to work on. I sometimes miss that job, but then I'm reminded of all the stress and anger it engendered - mostly due to US West's shenannigans (We placed over 41 circuit orders - not one was on time or correct). I miss being cursed at for being a "low ping bastard" while playing Quake clan matches while parked atop a T1. 🤣 Mostly good times. :)
Haha. There was a young tech group at the local computer shop/ISP here in my area. We would go there to learn and were given PCs and access to their Dual T1 network. It was kids in a candy store. Think being the only "low ping bastard" was bad? Try all eight of us hitting a Quake server all sitting at like 30 ping. Amazing how fast we could clear a server out.
I miss dialing into the Teflon Rose BBS in Virginia. I asked the BBS guy if I could visit and see his setup.
The guy was amazing! HE had over 80 telephone lines dropped into his house and using those foldable lunch tables had over 80 modems up and running and it was so cool to listen to the ambiance of everything running watching him sit down to administer account. I was impressed.
I worked at the largest dialup ISP in Nebraska around 2000. We had so many modems in many locations. At our main office it was a staggering number of them. We took the case off US Robotics modems and rack mounted them standing up. Then mounted them directly over the portmasters. This saved a lot of space but didn't solve the cable nightmare. Many zip ties were used to manage the cables.
In our smaller locations they would tend to be housed in a local computer store or the like and took up a shelf. A portmaster with a bunch of loose modems. But, these locations often only had 25-100 modems each. A few smaller towns only had a dozen.
It all came down to the law of averages. If utilization was high, we would add more modems to a location.
In other locations we had something else that was entirely digital. It was also a portmaster of sorts, but with 48 modems built in. Those were the best kind as you could reboot it as a whole to clear issues. I don't remember what the model number was as that's been many years ago.
Anyway, one of my jobs was to care for the modems. This involved writing software to scan every modem we controlled and look for anything unusual. Be it users that had been connected for more than 12 hours, or modems that were in stuck states. I wrote the software in such a way that it would telnet in to each of them, make a report and then another script that would take that report and take various actions to try to fix the modems in odd states. Often this involved having my script issue at commands to reset the modem in question. Then, I would re-run the first script and the report would give me a much smaller list of problem modems. I'd then have to call whatever location had have them physical reset the modems.
I don't even remember how many thousands of modems we had. It was a huge number.
Though, as DSL, Cable internet and such took off the company slowly failed. It's a sad story, and I left before total failure. But, it was a fun ride.
👋
You guys are amazing. You have managed to create one of the most informative and at the same time entertaining channels about old network equipment and technologies.
No clue how I got here.... flashbacks to 1997-ish when I owned an ISP in Chicago. We had almost 100 of these fully stocked and fully deployed. Yes, we replaced I cant tell you how many portmasters and physical modems with these units. Great flashback to the past.
The Trib shown threw me back to when I worked at 3Com (Elk Grove) supporting dialup and cable modems.
Over a period of about 20 years we moved from a world where data moved over the phone network, to a world where phones connect to the data network.
Excellent presentation. Thank you. I had one of those Multitech chassis with 12 modems hooked up to a Win 2000 server up until just a few years ago. I always liked the higher end Multitech modems. In the end, it was just an emergency backup to get in if the fiber internet went down. That setup was helpful more than once as a backup into the network. Love seeing folks being interested in this stuff.
How many phone lines did you have?
Cellular is my backup if my fiber connection goes down.
@@DAndyLordThere were 12 inbound numbers from a copper PRI/T1 for inbound calls. Outbound calls would use any available port on the PRI.
Cool stuff! Thanks for making the this video. In the 1990s and early 2000s I was a co-owner and chief network engineer of a regional ISP. We started out with Livingston Portmasters for dial-up and upgraded to a dozen or so Total Control when the 56k standard came in.
I loved the Total Control units, the totally delivered on simplified management and increase reliability. When a modem (or analog phone line) went bad using the Portmaster /w external modem setup it was a nightmare to find. Dial-up customer would report an intermittent "ring-no-answer" condition. That kind of problem basically didn't happen on Total Control. I recall a DSP card went bad once but it was obvious what card it was.
The two T1 ports on the back came in handy. We go no documentation on how to get them to work, but I fiddled with them and eventually got them to work. Seeing your video it sounds like they were intended to be upstream connections to a main data center when using a Total Control in a remote POP, which I find very interesting given the lack of documentation. We had Cisco routers at all POPs (installed in the postmaster era) which were the gateways for the Total Control. So, we used the T1 ports on the back of the Total Control to connect T1s we sold to customers. Cisco routers cost a couple grand per port so leveraging the T1 ports on the Total Control was a welcome cost reduction.
I remember working on these back in the 90s for an ISP and also a major corporation who had its own dial up service. Back then USR had its own standard called X2 and it competed with Kflex 56. If you wanted to use X2 you had to dial into a 3Com/USR bank and you had to be using a 3Com or USR modem at home that was also capable of X2. Wow this brings back many memories in dormant brain cells! Thanks for sharing
I remember the “format war”. It lasted maybe six months until a compromise was reached, and both became compatible with a firmware upgrade.
That thing is awesome.
It's amazing to think of the sheer amount of... stuff... that was just abandoned in the late 90s/early 00s. All of that explosive growth translated to shelves, racks and presumably entire buildings full of modems and related equipment towards the end of the dialup era. It must have been a huge amount of e-waste on a global scale, as broadband services rolled out all of this stuff suddenly became worthless and needed to go.
Plus the adoption of virtualization. Sooo many bare metal boxes were thrown to the curb in the late mid to late 2000's/early 2010's. Must have been a wild time.
I love watching these videos. I was a kid when we got dial up internet in the early 90's. Now today we operate a cable/wireless/fiber ISP and the history of all this is great!
I'm sure you've already got this figured out, but if you need a quick and dirty solution for T1 lines, any old Cisco router with a T1 card can emulate one. You just need to set the clock source to internal on the T1 controller. EDIT: Forgot to mention, you'll also need a T1 cross-over cable, which should be pretty easy to make.
We used 2500 Ciscos with the T1 cards in them. The telecoms gave them to us as subscribers to their service. The Sprint 2500 had dual T1/E1 cards in it, so we had a discussion with Sprint about tapping both card's potential. No soap. Not for another $1500/month.
It also has to be the channelized T1 and not the WIC-1DSU-T1-V2 that you find in practically every 1841
@@Tevruden ah, the CSU/DSU. My memory is not what it was. Thanks.
Always wanted to play with one of those. The two ISPs I ran decided to just stick with "known good" gear and went from PM2s to PM3s. The PM3 seems less complicated than these USR boxes. T1s in, Ethernet out. Took calls from 300 to 56k as well as ISDN connections.
Ah, the good times before telcos and cable took over.
At the ISP I worked for back in the day, we had a mix of Ascend Maxs (and TNTs) and PM3s: PRIs aplenty.
I don't have to imagine the spaghetti mess. I worked at an ISP in the 90s. We had rows and rows of USR modems plugging into BSDi through octopus cables. We were, as I understand it, the first mutihomed dialup ISP. Those were the days...
Worked for an ISP in Canada back in the late 90s and early 2000s which had this. Thanks for the flashback, and elaborations that I was too naive to fully grasp at the time!
Was it a big one? I'm in MB and maybe I'm having a brain fart, but after BBSes faded away, I don't seem to remember there being any popular ISPs other than the incumbent telco, MTS. I was somewhat tech savvy, but nothing crazy, so maybe I was just oblivious.
@@grabasandwich Nah, it was a small-to-medium sized one in Montreal.
Haha! What a blast from the past. I ran a bank of 2400 of these for Rutgers back in the mid-90s. They were actually pretty good, compared to the other banks we maintained.
Hate to say, but I just tossed out a CD-ROM of TC install media last week as I was cleaning my office.
I was there when we finally removed the last of the tape library from the Hill Center DC, and when the newer protein folding clusters got moved in replacing the IBM blue gene. They still had the old sun Microsystems mainframes in there when I left.
I have one of these from the local dial-up ISP I used to work for. It was gifted to me after they sold off their customer base to another ISP sometime around 2010-ish. I believe it is populated with v.92 high performance cards, and I am looking forward to more installments so I can figure out how to put this beast to use today without going broke trying to order PRI from the local telco. ;)
Try fractional or burst T1 circuits.
Does it need to be connected to the real phone network? If not, all ya need is an old Cisco ISR and a few cards...
@@nickwallette6201 No it will only be connected to a HiPer DSP or PRI backplane card via a Smart Jack on the wall.
@@Nighthawke70 Was asking the OP what their plans were ...
@@nickwallette6201 I don't have any immediate plans for it, but these videos might give me some ;)
Hey! I used to have a bunch of these in service back in the 90's when I helped run an ISP. Had a bunch of those SPARCs too being used as our servers. At one POP we had a cardboard box full of USR 33.6 Couriers because we didn't have room for a rack. I remember when 56k X2 came around and USR offered a firmware update to upgrade the Couriers. Holy crap, that took a long time to do as we had HUNDREDS of those things.
Oh wow, the nostalgia. I fondly remember my USR sportster 28.8 kpbs modems in high school. When I got to college, me and a few friends tried to start an ISP and we got a few nice little PCI cards that each could plug into a T1 and provide 24 v.90 ports for dialup in a Windows NT4 RAS server with I think it was dual Pentium II CPUs. I switched off the FCC 53,300 bps limit and we did manage to get a full 56,000 bps connection dialing in from home. Fun times.
Man, I love these videos... and I can't explain why. It's a fascinating look at what was behind my adventures on the early internet. Great work guys!
Great report! I remember similar devices in the early 90s at 3M. We didn't call it IT then, it was Data Processing. I do recall banks of 2400 baud modems.
Keep up the good work, and yes see if you can find an ISDN device too! They are cool.
Back in the early 2000s I ran an ISP. Started with a USR Total Control box.... but it wasn't compatible with the equipment that was in my local town that the local phone company used.... So I had to sell it and I went with Lucent PortMasters.... Those worked great.
Supported one of these as recently as around 2015. Worked on the side at a computer shop that used to be one of the largest ISP’s in West Virginia. Up until the owner passed away he demanded that we continued to provide dialup to the 5 customers we still had. Still had one PRI line coming into the shop and I would use the dialup as a last ditch remote in if something went wrong with our main router on our newer network.
Not only can I imagine it, I've seen it first hand. ('tho in an era before cameras were built into everything.) There was an ISP out near the mountains of NC (Blueridge Internet?) that had stacks of USR sportster desktop modems on window screens with an attic fan over each stack. That was the ISP. Yes, one or two would burn out (literally) per week. It was "cheaper" than the up front cost of a TC chassis. ("People are irrational and bad at math" - the cost of those modems could've bought a TC chassis every few years, not to mention the power and cooling savings.)
Ugh, don't get me started on false-economies that are cheaper in the short-term and vastly pricier in the medium-term. It seems entire countries run on that methodology now.
Fascinating look at the behind the scenes infrastructure that ran Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, and the like. I joined Lucent in the late 90’s and played with and supported ISDN, DS1 and DS3 connectivity for small and medium business PBXs. I’m really curious to learn how the 56k setup works as you needed to have a fully analog span between the user and the POP. Loving this series!
The 56k setup was digital on the isp side and the analog portion was only on the user end. By about 2001 there was higher upload speed v.92 but it reduced download speed, so for maximum download you had to force an analog 33.6 upload to get back to 56k download.
This doesn't work like that, the modems work on digitized voice channels carried over the TDM bus in the backplane. The T1 interface card supplies those digital voice channels from a digital T1 trunk. So really this box provides a way to transfer digital data using an elaborate analog encoding scheme over a digital carrier to the CO, where the actual analog channel would begin.
Obviously this has huge overhead, this entire box is handling only around 1 megabit/s of data!
@@-szega got confused seeing "CO" all over these comments, only thinking "commanding officer", until I finally remembered while reading your one that Americans call exchanges "central offices"! So thank you, for providing enough context there haha.
These videos are just incredible. The content and the subtle background music, so good. Thank you!
I don't have to image. We had four FULL PortMaster 2e's. We started with Supra modems and then jumped to de-cased USR Sportsters in 5-pack zip-tied bundles. I think we ended up with a 20U (ish) Bay Networks terminal server.
This is really cool to see such equipment to run and follow it's task
Another wish list item you may want to look for is a 'Portmaster 3 series', its been too long to remember all of the details. but back in the late 90s we had them setup with full voice T1s and 24 modems internally, we ran those side by side with our racks of sportster v.92 modems on our Portmaster 2 units.
I believe when they got to the 3 series, Lucent bought up Livingston.
We got one of the rebadged PM3's from Lucent. Rock stable those beasties were.
only the rich kids had total control chassis. Most of us just rocked Livingtons and massive piles of sportsters.
wait can you imagine upgrading the total control to 128.8 kbps🤪🤪
Congratulation on the 56k subscriber count. It seems fitting.
I worked at an ISP in the Houston area from 1996-2000, and we had Ascend(later Lucent) Max for dialup connectivity. I think each one was 3U or 4U and I want to say they handled 2 PRIs each, and had 6 of them for around 300 simultaneous connections. Since they were pretty expensive, only a couple of the units had 56k capability, and the rest maxed out at 33.6. I lived far enough away from the CO that it didn't matter, as I could never get higher than a 26.4 connection even with a 56k modem. I had friends that worked at 2 other local ISPs and they also used Maxes for connectivity. I'm guessing they must have been cheaper than USR as all of these places were relatively small.
yep, I also worked for an ISP in the late 90's/early 2000's. we had Ascend/Lucent TNT's and later Lucent APX-8000's. the APX-8000's supported. The APX-8000 supported 4 DS-3's (~2700 ports/modems) per chassis.
Modems! Modems!! MODEMS!!!
I always thought it was weird, even back in the day, that US Robotics didn't build any actual robots.
My childish thought at the time was that they tried to build robots, failed and settled on modems for some reason.
@@miketech1024 same, then when I read Asimov I was like "oh... it's a reference"
I used to work in Tut Systems DSLAMS when out little startup in China in the pre ADSL days would pull fibre to buildings and then break out and sell SDSL services.
I worked breifly with an ISP in the 90's we used the Total Control and the PortMaster, that same one you had. my memories are spotty from the time, I feel like you'd run in to a better helper, but if it came down too it I'd be happy to help.
Back in the early 90's I ran a small BBS out of my house and had two lines and was on Fidonet. I had two USR Couriers, and ironically still have those two modems today. One of them is a demo/engineering sample with a gold plaque on it that its not for sale, that I got from USR as a free donation at the time. Those were the days! 👍😁 Things were the simple days!
I love seeing all this old behind the scenes hardware that made connecting to the internet possible. Thank you for sharing!
Still have one of those old US Robotics modems, but no phone line. Remember seeing an early POP for an ISP, with a room full of modems there, all of them with spaghetti cording at the back, and the incoming lines being connected via Krone blocks direct to the cut in half phone cords for the modems, saving on buying sockets to wire them up. That was eventually replaced entirely with T1 lines and digital software.
I ran a 3COM Total Control chassis and a pair of Ascend 4048s at my tiny ISP back in the early 2000s. For some reason, USR modems always connected at a higher speed to the Ascends, and Lucent winmodems did better on the 3COM. I never could figure out why. I don't remember what happened to them after I sold the ISP. I think I sold the Ascends to another ISP who wanted them for spare parts, and the Total Control might have ended up in a dumpster. Nobody seemed to want it back then because the shift away from dial-up to DSL and cable was well underway and electronics recycling was unheard of. It was a real workhorse, though.
I worked for a small dialup ISP right out of high school in the 90s. We had Livingston portmasters and then later picked up some total controls. The modems connected to the portmasters were USR 33.6 modems, shucked out of their shells and placed int to purpose built racks with hangers to save space.
Your story sounds like something right out of our 90s mom and pop ISP biz - The outfit I worked for filled the demand for internet connectivity all over the northsate, small towns that had plenty of customers but not enough to attract the larger ISPs. We partnered with other local business and put up little mini ISPs wherever we could. (Gott have that flat rate local calling rate!) Closets in beauty salons. Storage rooms in supermarkets, pizza joints, and even a community center.
Small down dialup ISPs survived for longer than most because broadband reached those places last. I could see one of our old locations just being left in place, forgotten after dialup finally faded away.
V.EVERYTHING forever!!!
Before we bought the Total Control units, I recall meeting with sales people from Ascend, Livingson, and all the other companies making 56k grear. I remember the US Robotics salesman pointing out that they had the best BLPD ratio of all digital modem appliances. Blinking-lights-per-dollar :-)
I recall choosing Total Control because of Us Robotics reputation, the fact that their X2 56k tech seemed like it was becoming the dominant standard (versus K56flex used by the others), and the modularity of the Total Control was super appealing.
Some familiar equipment there, I worked with computer stores, BBSs and ISPs from the early 1990's. At one time, I had a USR Sportster on a dedicated line at the one ISP, and a matching one at home. Used that setup until I got a wireless connection for several times the speed of the modems. I went to work for the Wireless ISP, and upgraded my connection and equipment a few times over the years. Seems like we started out with Teletronics, then moved to Turbo Cell on RG-1000s and old Apple AirPorts on 2.4GHz, then some 3.6GHz gear, before moving to Ubiquiti. They had one customer on the old Turbo Cell system for years, as it was about a 50 mile hop to the one mountain top they could see. ISP had coverage into five counties when I left, and plans to expand.
I'd love to read more about this Turbo Cell long-distance wireless networking, but alas both Google and DDG are bringing-up nothing but totally useless results about LTE, wifi, and water treatment equipment called Turbo Cell. Is there anything else I could narrow-down the terms with? Like a standards number, or an originating company?
@@kaitlyn__L It was using 802.11b, but modified timing for the greater distance. It required the right kind of wireless card, basically Lucent, or whatever they were going by at the time. It required a license for each CPE device, and you ran a computer with the cards plugged in to it as your AP. We used a RADIUS system to allocate the bandwidth to each client, based on the MAC of the CPE device.The company that produced and sold it was Karlnet. Apparently YDI bought them back in 2004.
Having flashbacks..
Spent almost a decade running a large dial up ISP with Portmaster 3s, and Total Controls. There were later cards for the TCs that allowed for Quad PRIs, 92 modems *per slot*. I don't know if you could fill the entire thing with those, but I had a few running with 4 of the quad cards. Was sooo nice, until a card/slot ate shit, which happened a lot , those midplanes were really touchy.
I think at the end we scrapped at least 50 of those chassis. The steel was probably worth a good buck.
Portmaster3s were honestly our bread and butter though. 3U , 2 PRIs per chassis, but dirt cheap. $50 a pop , and that was 20 years ago. Had a memory leak in the software though which was annoying, but wasn't terrible.
You could load a TC with a DS3's worth of ports using those Quad PRI cards, along with a DS3 mux card. When they worked, they were OK replacements for the PM3 with much better rack density. They had OSPF issues, (as did the PM3s) that could be worked around, but the bigger problem was random hardware failure in the cards, modem cards would just die with no recovery method I ever found. (And trying to figure out if it was the NIC or NAC side that failed...) Add in the management software for them never making it past Win XP support and they were a royal PITA to support as time went on.
At one point we had somewhere around 20 of these units installed. Originally with quad modem cards and Netserver cards, then later HiperDSP and HiperARC cards. I still have one running along with an old install of TCM (Total Control Manager) in a VM we fire up to remotely reboot it when it starts misbehaving.
Another great presentation, guys!
I remember testing these. We also tested X.2 with them. We got through quite a few of them too. The first ones came with a separate fan tray and you really do not want people to unplug it because it would baconate. "there's smoke coming out of the rack, should I turn it off?" When not incinierating themselves, they were really reliable.
They went from 1 rack with 2 T.1's and 48 modems, to a T1/card while we were using them.
I still have my free total control screwdriver too.
Just a small thing - the port on the T1 port is actually an RJ48 style and not an RJ45 - almost the same but a little different.
I helped build a dial-up ISP in Fort Wayne IN back in the day (96-98). we built it from 0 to about 1500 subscribers at its peak. We started out with boxes that had 16 ISA slots that we populated with 33.6 modem cards -- if memory serves we had 2 boxes at our main office and 1 in a branch office. Each office also had a Windows Server running RAS services. Then we upgraded to a 3Com TotalControl box in the main office with 2 PRI cards. If memory serves, the TotalControl didn't go through RAS, but routed directly after authenticating with a RADIUS server. EDIT: Oh and we definitely had our modem cards upgraded to the 56k firmware 😉
This probably wouldn't fly these days, but I remember getting tech support calls where the customer couldn't log into email and would swear they had their password right. So I'd do a trace on the session (all unecrypted of course) and see they had Caps Lock on or some such thing and gently suggest they open Notepad and try typing it there -- oh, it's typing all big letters 😲 Maybe you should try hitting that button with the light on the left of your keyboard until the light turns out.
That was when GTE was still the big telco in the area, right? What was the name of the ISP?
My local nursing home used to have a dialup access system for doctors. They had one of these in the basement up until about 2002. At that point the copper phone lines were replaced by IP Softphones. Also the home had been purchased and the new owner didnt like the dialup system… I don’t blame them, it was a private number with a password but that was it.
So many nice memories managing these ones remotely... big shot out to the oswf working as remote hands an eyes on these.
Love the wood paneling in that data center. I also worked in one with carpet in those days!
It's cool seeing this old hardware power on and work again. Technology and the Internet was still in infancy when this stuff was state of the art. I'm pretty sure there are a couple locations right around the corner from me that used to host small dial-up ISPs. One location has what appears to be 80s/90s era Fiber Optic cable from the Bell Atlantic / NYNEX days going onto it. No idea if it's still in use today for some other purpose. Another location has an awfully big copper trunk going into it for being a Residential address.
Oh boy, this brings back memories of dealing with the TC for dialup card processors...
I tried to start an ISP back in the early 90's in a little backwoods town here in New Mexico, but the local Telco refused to provide me with a T1 line to accomplish it. I had a 24 line setup with individual USR V.34 modems, and the resources to purchase a T1 router. I found out later that year, that they already had plans in the works for their own ISP, so it would have been a losing battle to try to compete with them.😜
I worked for Infinet who was a manufacturer of telecom switching equipment. ISDN, and various modems. Just before the company was fully integrated into Memotec, they came out with a similar product that had racks-mounted 56K modems. These modems used Motorola 68K chips and were fully redundant just like their other IDM product line. If a modem card died, the control-card would send a message to a console and out on the network to a remote operator.
After getting laid-off from Infinet, I worked for a life insurance company that set up chatterbox PCs in their computer room to allow remote transactions from their satellite offices. Periodically, we had to reboot the set up due to the software running out of memory and crashing.
and while he was cleaning out the system, a banker and a loan officer named Patty Wac stopped by, and she asked what all the equipment was for, and the banker said to the loan officer,
"its a Nic / Nac Patty Wac, give the man a loan, an ISP he does own"
What a flashback ... We had the portmasters ... trying to get them to do dynamic routing updates was such a pain ... we jumped for joy when they did triggered RIP updates...
Motorola had a 19" rack mount cage that stored individual modem cards..
The migration to Cisco's was joyful - back when Cisco weren't the horrible mess that they have become.
Love it! I still remember them from the good old days when I worked in a service center and had to fix them.
TCI@home used these with DOCSIS cards installed to make a CMTS (cablemodem termination system). Too bad 3COM couldn't get it Cable Labs certified until about a year after we launched. IIRC there were 8 upstream cards (modem to headend) and one downstream card (headend to modem). Each upstream card had 2 ports but very quickly we had to redesign the coax network to only use one port on each upstream to handle the traffic.
We finally replaced them with Cisco UBR 7200 CMTSs after 3COM couldn't quash the memory leaks and other bugs. Had far fewer CMTS problems after that...
The isp I worked at had numbers for 56k x2 that went to USR racks like yours and 56k flex that went to rockwell racks. Now I need to find the pictures of it. Such a cool place to work back then.
The ISP I worked for was an Ascend shop, but we eventually got some USR TCs via the company that eventually acquired us. I still preferred the Ascend gear, but I liked how crazy modular the USR TCs were. By the end of my ISP career we were operating Ascend (later acquired by Lucent) Max TNTs and Apex 8000s, which supported up to 672 and 2688 dialup connections respectively. I was really young and had no idea what I was doing most of the time, but we some how kept it all running. 😂
oh god a 10Base2 connector! Just smack that early 90's nostalgia straight into my arm, such good memories 🙂
This is truly a fascinating journey - looking forward to the next instalment!
This is cool. And I'm sitting here thinking 'I can help test a dial up with my 2 1999 era laptops'. Then I remember that my home has no phone line. But I do have a 1998/9 era Compaq Armada (which did have many components replaced in Australia in 2002) running Win2K and a 1999 MacBook on OS9 that have modems. Both should still function.
Hi there,
Found this very Interesting, a blast from the past.. I had a US robotics router, bought when my first house was outta zone for getting broadband and my ISP talked me into ISDN (2002 Nightmare from British Telecom, No better today)... anyway I used to have a separate PC with a NIC and NAC card along with a usRobotics Router *was a first perches on ebay lol*. anyway worked really well for 3 months.
was fun to play with and learn but also since I had no net without it, a pain to look any information up.
The good old days :P Thanks for the walk down memory lane :)
I worked for a small ISP in the late 90s. When I started they had a pair of closets full of modems stacked on top of each other. A few months later, though, they replaced that entire mess with a TotalControl chassis and a new RADIUS server.
Total Scrutinizer software was like a cheat code for troubleshooting dialup issues. These chassis were amazing for regional Australia, especially with a USR Courier or Maestro Woomera as the CPE
Oh god, these things were terrible. We had a couple of these before deploying Ascend boxes that were much easier to manage. The Total Control box was (as I recall) 3 independently managed systems in a box, which wasn't great. And it was clear that USR didn't really know much about operating channelized T-1 spans. I recall an episode where a remote loop got sent to the CSU in the Total Control rack, but there wasn't an obvious way to clear the loop locally, unless you reset the system which dropped all the calls on the OTHER T-1 board.
Eventually at UUNET we migrated to a few hundred thousand modem ports of Ascend TNT-MAX boxes that took channelized DS-3 spans for 672 modems (or less if ISDN signaling) in a (very, very hot!) box that was like 8U high in a rack. These were pretty spiffy, with the major fault being side-to-side airflow for cooling.
Yeah, good times! Great experience to have had in retrospect. Modem interoperability for V.90 modems was another thing to behold, too. There was quite a range of crappy modems in the consumer channels those days..
Motorola also made stellar modem racks which weren’t as popular due to costs but often were even better designed than the US Robotics modems. Early ISPs were often cheapskates but in critical applications we installed lots and lots of Motorola units.
These things were kinda legendary back in the day. Nice find!
I had one of these, unused, at my first job in London in 1997. We never quite got it going, and soon after, client VPN connections ruled the land. I have memories of trying so hard to get dial-in working, but I knew very little back then compared to now!
Thanks for this series - looking forward to watching!
when will this channel hit on ISDN stuff? I never had that sort of connection, I went from dialup to a 1.5mbps cable connection back in 2001 - but i did see ISDN modems being sold and even services. I just think ISDN is fascinating, since it is kind of the precursor to DSL, and there were also ISDN/- DSL type connections.
Not really. I had all. I don't know, how ISDN worked in the US, Europe had first several versions and later on (when I came to ISDN) Euro-ISDN. ISDN, despite internally using concepts like ATMs behind the scenes at the telco level, in fact it was just a normal dial up connection like with a modem, but with different hardware, instant dialing and 64kbps without errors, which just made it far faster than the 56k modems... Of course, error correction was built in already, so there was nothing else than the 64k and two available channels which, because of the costs, near to nobody combined...
DSL, on the other hand, is a completely own infrastructure running in parallel to the phone network (called POTS, plain old telephone service). Those networks were divided by the "splitter". The principle is still the same, the only difference became, that the splitter became integrated into the universal device, later on... I doubt, newer standards really use those old, slow POTS frequencies until today, as until today, you can get an Analogie telephone line in at least some large phone networks, despite VDSL250 is available on the curb...
So ISDN was still classic dialup. But as back then, the phone networks still were based on ISDN / ATM, (A)DSL was based on ATM. As those components were damn expensive and Ethernet became the standard in telco networks, at VDSL, the emulating overhead had been thrown out and today a VDSL modem is nothing more than a bridge between Ethernet and VDSL to the curb and afterwards, it goes further with Ethernet again... In Germany, the ISP service usually resides on VLAN ID 7...
Oh, and to better show it on a customer level: Modems and ISDN used plain PPP (exceptions might have used SLIP) over modem or ISDN, just plain old serial communication. DSL had used PPPoA, PPP over ATM, which might have later been translated to Ethernet. As with VDSL, you have in fact only a media translator, you directly use PPPoE, PPP over Ethernet, for dialing in at your ISP...
@@compukiller2 well im in the USA , and while ISDN perhaps was not as common here as it was in Europe , it was certainly offered - and I only compared it to DSL as you had audio and data channels - hence you could use voice and data at the same time , like DSL - though again I do recall reading somewhere that at some point there was an ISDN-DSL . Also perhaps in Europe ISDN rates were also dirt cheap maybe? Since it was so common there - again yes it was offered here too in the USA , but the BRI of ISDN was out of reach for everyone, unless you had a very specific need for it, and could get it - and you did also have bonded ISDNs , multiple 64k connections reaching up to a blistering 384kbps or even almost 500kbps .
@@compukiller2 i recall ATM DSL modems being more pricey also , and yea i know about ppp pppoe , and SLIP protocols on dialup .
ISDN in the home was a very brief thing in the UK but in some countries I believe it was available and widespread a little earlier. I seem to remember 1998-2001 being the era it was semi-common here, it was marketed as "BT Home Highway" and was popular with gamers before Cable and later ADSL became available due to the latency advantage. I think it was quite expensive however and I don't believe any unmetered services ever existed but could be wrong there, I remember people who had it would only rarely connect both 64k channels at once (for faster downloads) due to the extra cost of doing so.
Back in the later part of the 90s I installed (5) US Robotics Total Control Hubs for my employer who used them to allow stores to connect remotely into the AS/400 system. I had a small RADIUS server that did the authentication. I configured each T1 as B8ZS to give the maximum amount of data for each channel a store could connect to. Sadly, we were sold before this ever became the production system. 😞
I think it's important to mention that during the evolution of modems they stopped being end to end analog connections. That's why this level of integration is even possible.
The customer modem basically twittered analogue to a modem in a Telco very close to the customer and the rest ran ISDN style on the digital network of the phone provider.
A PRI will only give you access to 46 modems, as a PRI is 23B(bearer)+D(data for circuit management). You'll need to configure/use it with T1 supertrunks (24 digital lines per T1) to use all 48. It shouldn't be hard to find equipment to interface the T1 supertrunk to analog, if you don't have a PBX that handles supertrunks.
I used to admin a total control for a small ISP in central California from 1997 through 2006 or so. Very reliable piece of hardware.
47 if the software on the TC isn't stupid. One D channel can support multiple PRIs worth of B channels. The main limitations being that all the PRIs in the group have to be homed on the same switch and you have to have enough D channels to handle whatever amount of Q931 you're trying to pass. If your call times are stupid short you may barely be able to live with 1D per PRI. If they're stupidly long you may be able to get away with 1D for an entire DS3's worth of PRIs, assuming the telco can support that large of a group.
I have 3 Courier v.Everything and 1 Courier sysop dual-standard with the not for sale plate on it. I had a pair of 1st gen Sportsters but always preferred the Couriers. We used a pair of 24port(?) Shiva LANRovers at work before our remote offices could get broadband.
The fun part of being able to provide 56k/V.90/V.92 was that you needed a PRI line from the phone company to be able to provide that kind of speed over dialup. The number of digital to analog conversions by the phone company was limited, i believe just to a single conversion. The connection at the PRI is purely digital, but gets converted to analog at (I believe) the customer's CO. I worked for an old dialup ISP back in the early 00's. We used Ascend/Lucent MAX servers to provide the dialup access.
I had dial up at my parents until around 2010 ish, eventually were able to wireless ( expensive and download limit of 5gb a month ) the main reason we couldn't get ADSL was because of pair gained lines, never heard of that term before and hardly ever talked about especially very limited information about it.
Because we live in a cul-de-sac, and on the other side was brand new housing, there weren't any new phone lines, so they used ours because it was the last in the box, and split it to make more lines, this effectively half our dialup speed 56.6k down to 28.8k, and were never able to get ADSL because of that.
Acend MAX unit is what we did our nation wide roll out with. They worked great.
No 'Total Control' here, we used Portmasters in 1993... 100 incoming POTs 2500 users at what was then "Navicom Internet Services" in Salem, Oregon... Good luck with the "Total"...
Worked at a small ISP in 96 .. few of those Livingston 2e filled out completely with external modems.. all connected with DB25 cables. Spaghetti mess!! Great blinky light show though!
I’m glad someone is hunting this, now, ancient tech down and documenting it.
What you got there at 12:38 is actually the only official standardized pinout for RS232 on a 8P8C connector, it's EIA-561 :)
I worked at a place where we got one of the first Livingstone serial servers, using external modems. Cool thing and silly expensive.
Ah the portmaster 2e... brings back memories. Not used for a modembank but as a cheap serial console server for servers. When terms like SDN, cloud and CDN were already working but the business guys didn't know about it for another decade.
At that time it was COTS servers and fully software configurable network topology. Filling your rack with cheap servers and connecting it to switches, and serial port servers like the portmaster, and be done with it and later design the network and software architecture from the desk. That's about 25 years ago.
Ah, cyclades, great stuff, if it wasn't for the numerous memory and storage leaks. But that was already a decade later than the portmaster. When BMC's finally got introduced (PC server hardware sucks, thanks to wanting to serve Microsoft), we were really having a hard time deciding if it was worth the cost of a switch port. Eventually we replaced the cyclade with a overbooked switches for the OOB management of the servers, while having the front of the servers hooked up to non-overbooked switches.
But really nothing has changed in the last 25 years, except that switches got better and more cheap, and PC-servers like supermicro finally became on par with serial console as primary servers like the original sun Sparcs.
Worked on a Cisco 3600 with two isdn-30 lines (company dial-in) 👍🤓🇩🇰🇩🇰
No stand a lone modems needed 👍
Oh I miss dial-up. I ran a couple Ascend Max TNTs until dial-up was nearly dead in our area. I managed to snag an upgrade to support V.92 right at the end, but none of the few users left were able to negotiate much above 28.8 so I never saw it get any use.
I’ve always been very curious about the beginnings of home internet access. Very interesting to see that companies setup PoPs anywhere when they could and made sense.
How would all this connect upstream? Back via AT&T via some leased line (T1/T3?) back to PSINet? And where was that?
Yeah, it's kind of funny how we've started to think of servers as needing all this dedicated hardware around them like a telephone exchange or electrical substation. But back then it was basically just any computer you wanted to connect to a spare phone line. All sorts of small businesses shoved an old, spare, computer in a corner with an old, spare, modem and used it as their own personal dialup server.
This was actually a pretty fancy rack by comparison, even though it was just in some cupboard in a gym!
I have pictures of ours lit up where each modem card had 10 lights.
Share!
This is a fun channel. Thanks for the interesting content
Some DialStar sysadmin from the 90's is watching in horror as the vehicle upon which they rode into a revolution is dismantled for views.
Another DialStar sysadmin from the 00's is watching with popcorn as the legacy burden that could never quite go away finally becomes someone else's problem.
I wish I would have found this video sooner, as the company I work for recently scrapped 2 of the chassis each loaded with 11 of the DSP cards, each with a Access Router Card & Network Mgt. Card. I would have found someway to get them to you guys!
We had a bunch of these for the regional ISP I helped start. I loved the Hiper cards, though.
Since I didn't like using Windows to administrate these, we did 95% of the administration via command line and I wrote up scripts that used SNMP to pluck the LED statuses off the front and generate images that could be served up by a webserver. The code was out on the internet for years, but I don't know if it's still out there. I probably have a copy of it, but I'd never find it.
It's a shame, but later I started work on a live Java app to grab the info, but got side tracked and it never got far.
I think I still have an old TC unit floating around my house from a small ISP I used to own in WI. Those things were awesome. I was thrilled to dump the PortMaster 3 I had started it with - the PM3 was just too unreliable on connection quality compared to the TC in the area I was at (channelized T1 at the office, no one in the area wanted ISDN so didn't see a point at the time getting PRI T1s). Not sure if it had to do with the quality of the rural phone lines at the client houses or what, but the PM3 just couldn't maintain a good connection to my clients.
Ah the good old days, I remember wrangling some of these into racks when I worked at an ISP ~1994/1995. Get a few of these together, and you'll need ear protection, these things are *loud* AF with that fan tray.
At work we wrote a software system that was interfaced to Microcom modem racks for dial-out support of our customers.
Oh I have the Cisco version of this (AS5300) that is currently configured for 4 T1s and 120 modems. Its wild that the T1 is the slowest network link in my house.
Cool! I remember going from the 4-port cards to the HiPer DSP cards in my ISP business so many years ago. I think I was up to 5 of them at one time. It definitely was a learning curve, but not huge. I wonder if the company that I sold Forbin to (and just retired from!) still has those laying around. I'll check for you.