What Was ISDN?

Back around 1996 I was working for a non-profit rural digital project in Devon, Southwest England, called Project COSMIC. If I recall correctly there were 2 main types of ISDN in the UK at that time (a) on-demand, which was similar to dial-up, and needed an ISDN modem, or (b) leased line ISDN which was always on 24x7 and terminated in a Router. I was lucky enough at COSMIC to have access to a 64 Kbit/s ISDN leased line. As I recall it was insanely expensive, I think it was about £16,000 / year in 1996, and that doesn't include the initial install cost where they had to drag a cable across the fields and install poles.

On the end of COSMIC's leased line, after the Bay Area Networks router, we had a simple Ethernet Hub, a Windows NT 4.0 Server, and several Windows 95 desktops. We used IIS to serve websites and email for customers from the NT server, and all the machines had public IP addresses without a firewall - the Internet was a different place back then!

A few years later ~1999 they upgraded to a 128 Kbit/s ISDN leased line, I think costs had decreased and the additional capacity did not cause a large jump in price. It was brilliant! Many games of Quake were hosted ;-)

Later in around 2004 I worked for a company that had a leased line, but they used an entirely different technology - LES10 (10 Mbit/s) - but it had a range limitation and so you had to be within perhaps 10 KM of your ISP.

Of course, just before that, around 2000/2001 some parts of the UK started to get ADSL trial role-outs. I was lucky enough to be at University in one of the first areas (Derby), and we were able to get a 1 Mbit/s connection for about £50 / month which we shared between 5 of us in our student house. After that I didn't see ISDN around much, and LES10 was a pretty niche use-case anyway.

Today I am happily sat on the end of a 100 Mbit/s consumer microwave connection for about €30 / month.

In my CCNA training in 2007ish we actually got to use an ISDN simulator of some sort. It was a large physical box. I think you can buy them on eBay still.

Pretty sure this is no longer on the CCNA unfortunately. Maybe just a small mention.

Great album, BTW, one of my favorite. You can kinda hear this cultural moment in the music itself: Some of the sounds they use are rather primitive by modern standards. But other parts are really complex and nuanced.

So you get some sense of a transition of digital technology from novelty into mainstream.

You also get a cyberpunk vibe, a lot of it is dark and harsh, but at the same time organic and beautiful. It's not as abstract like Autechre's music, this is definitely about humans, but in a weird environment.

I used ISDL, a related technology based on ISDN operating at the same bandwidth, for a few years in Colorado in the early 2000's. It was the only thing better than dialup at the time. The ISP was Megapath Networks. Still have the Efficient 5871 IDSL modem somewhere.

Always on, static IP address. It was easily the most reliable service I have ever used, then or since. The latency was astonishingly low as well. But 128Kbps wasn't adequate and I moved on when I could.

I had an ISDN line in my home that, somehow, had a direct connection to the intranet of my employer at the time, Infoseek. Not sure how this was all arranged, but it was just like having a very long wire that went to my employer. Someone in Infoseek's IT department set it up.

Sometime after, DSL replaced this. And I used some form of DSL until, eventually, cable modems became cheap and fast and available in my area.