141–150 of 196 posts
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Cool Kids run T1s ;) Really Cool Kids T3s...
Thanks for the reminder. Those were heady days. My first programming job out of Uni had dual ISDN to the office.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
Some details/speculation from the original thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098186 “as modems got faster, supporting 16 modems on a single machine became impossible, and it was often cheaper to buy a new commodity desktop PC rather than a much more expensive machine with a 16-port serial card capable of handling the IO.”
I wrote the software for a breakout box that could handle 128 serial ports. It was an ISA backplane with an industrial 286 computer and multi-port serial cards. This was our solution for a MajorBBS system.
The BBS software would have to timeslice between all the cards handling each IRQ, then poll the card details to see which ports needed service.
GalactiComm eventually came out with their own around 1993 that could go out to 255 serial ports and did not require the 286 processor.
By the mid-90’s, Livingston PortMasters were the preferred way to aggregate serial connections, which quickly gave way to USR TotalControl.
I am surprised by the assumption that each box could only handle one modem. I seem to remember that some DOS BBS packages could handle multiple modems/users concurrently and only needed multitasking operating systems for “door” programs. Am I misremembering?
Even for a standard PC, you could buy a 16 port serial card and hook it up to 16 modems, either discreet devices or the dedicated ISP kit which might support dozens of incoming calls (possibly on a single bearer) via various means. Telebit netblazers and then ascend maxs were common in those days.
Awesome. Side note: virtual 8086 mode was protected mode, or rather, implied protected mode. A task could run in virtual 8086 mode where to the task it was (mostly) looking like it was running in real mode, when in actuality the kernel was running in full protected mode. Note that the "kernel" was never DOS. It could often actually be a so called "memory manager", like EMM386, and the actual DOS OS (the entire thing,…
And the follow-up article: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/01/27/scale/
The quote at the bottom is great: You can have a second computer once you've shown you know how to use the first one. -- Paul Barham, quoted in the COST paper
_Stand still laddie!_
This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware. They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning. As if 7 people chatti…
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I think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1 into.
Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.) PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the w…
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Hmm, that is interesting, why was that version originaly hosted on 3drealms site? Probably nothing, somebody there just wanted to share a cool picture. But what if that were an early apogee shareware distribution bbs?
it was 3D Realms official BBS https://nitter.privacyredirect.com/ScottApogee/status/159372... Scott Miller - Apogee/3D Realms Founder : >BBS's (bulletin board systems) were the backbone of the online world before the Internet came along in 1995. Apogee teamed up with Dan Linton's BBS, called Software Creations, and we poured $200k+ into it to grow it to nearly 140 call-in nodes with a T3 (high bandwidth) line.