For those that don't remember, a winmodem (aka softmodem) was smaller and cheaper because the modulation / demodulation was handled in software with host CPU and RAM. Using an external modem would free up CPU and RAM since it's handled in hardware.
I was doing dialup internet support when these things hit the market. What a fucking mess. It’s 25 years later and I still get anxious when the phone rings, because my brain thinks it might be a senior citizen who can’t connect after they got a good deal on a new computer. Sometimes we could get them back on line with an init string, but often they needed new drivers. Walking someone through either of those over the phone was brutal.
Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever take for granted!
Took maaaaaaany hours to for tech support to figure out why my $$$ 33.6k external modem worked sloooooooow. Often took them a lot of convincing that it was actually slow, a lot of early internet users had higher expectations, but I was coming from 2400bps service. Bazillions of failed packets reported in Windows Dial Up Networking.
Finally found the person that figured it out. Computer only had an 8250 UART for the serial port. $35 ISA serial port card with 16550A UART solved it!
I also briefly worked in Student IT support junior year of my university and "Winmodem" sent similar chills down my spine. An idea that never should have happened!
You can boil a lot of tech changes down to either A: Let's take this problem that has been solved in hardware and move it to software! and B: Let's take this problem that has been implemented in software and bake it into hardware.
Somehow, A is always a train wreck, and B usually pushes the abstraction stack upward and moves the industry forward. Yet, we as an industry keep trying A and expecting good results.
I was also doing dialup internet support around that time. Talking a senior citizen through setting up a dial up networking connection on Windows 95/98 using a winmodem on a line which was obviously noisy with no way to see what was on their screen was pretty common.
I remember one time I'd gotten the connection established and they said "now what?", and I said "You've connected to the Internet" and they said "so what do I do now?" They'd gone out and bought the internet package because it was the thing to do, but had no idea what to do with it. I ended up showing them how to go to Google which had only just been released that month.
And I definitely relate to being adverse to hearing a ringing phone
I was thankfully out of the ISP business before the Winmodems hit. But the many... agonising... hours... spent doing support sometimes with the same person to get people online is something I'll never forget. We had someone who'd call back every few weeks because he had "optimized" (broken beyond belief) his winsock configuration in new and inventive ways that makes me think he was most likely doing it on purpose for social contact.
Every time it'd take an hour or more, because you'd tell him to do X, ask him to confirm he'd done X, ask him if he was sure he'd done X, then have him try to go online, and he'd call back and it'd turn out he'd done Y because he "thought it'd work better".
Also, the sheer number of times people who'd get too trigger-happy and start trying to connect before they'd hung up...
“Winmodem” brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had its hard drive fail.
What a miserable machine that thing was. It might’ve been an upgrade on paper but between Windows 98 and the terrible hardware it was running on, it was a hopelessly crashy buggy mess that rendered any performance advantages it had over the Mac entirely moot.
Within a span of 6 months we sold it and replaced it with a Dell Dimension 4100 that cost 3x as much and was much much better, especially after replacing its stock 98SE install with Win2K. We never bought bargain basement computers again after that.
For me it brings back great memories of the first PC my folks bought for the family home where they asked _me_ what spec I'd like (Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 30GB disk, 17" CRT, Soundblaster Live! 5.1, Creative Labs 5.1 speakers). One might say it was the catalyst to what became my career - and love of gaming!
> “Winmodem” brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had its hard drive fail.
Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
Our family went through the same thing with a budget Celeron "MDG" computer running Windows 98. Awful. Keep in mind that, like you, I had previously used a IIsi and an LC630, so I figured... 300MHz, must be amazing?!?
At some point later, my high school had surplus Powermac 7500/100s that were gifted from Nortel and I managed to snag one, paired it with a USR 56k external modem and it was a million times better than that Celeron econobox.
further radicalizing the open source movement. this was a massive deal with linux people back then since it threatened to shut linux off the internet, which would kill it. (if you take the idea to the extreme as young people do, that every network hardware device would soon require single-source proprietary software from a monopolistic corporation).
Buying an external US Robotics 56k modem allowed me to get online with RedHat 8 (boxset purchased from Amazon, IIRC), as the PC I had contained a PCI Win-modem with no compatible Linux drivers. It was a friend at school who introduced me to Linux.
Surfing the web at home on Linux in the early 00s felt like I was in niche club :-)
Back in the day, Central Computer carried packaged RedHat and clear vinyl Slackware CD sets. One of the few brick and mortar computer and software store regional chains that still exist in the US, the other being MicroCenter.
I worked at Egghead Software in high school and managed NFR pricing on Netcom. Egghead was one of the first chains to go under because it couldn't compete with the hypermarts like CompUSA and Fry's Electronics, both of which are now also defunct given way to BestBuy and Amazon.
freeing cpu/ram generally wasn't the motivator to get a hardware modem. winmodems required drivers that generally were only available for windows ("win"modem)
at a consumer level, the only people that ever knew or cared were people trying to run linux or a bsd. h/w modems operated over a serial port, and didn't require any special kernel support.
at a consumer level, the only people that ever
knew or cared were people trying to run linux
or a bsd
Lots of tech support stories in the HN replies here, and the linked Anandtech discussion, that contradict that.
Yeah, winmodems were "good enough" for most. But tended to perform worse with noisy phone lines. Which were really common. Which is what the linked article talks about.
Also remember that DOS online gaming was a thing for a few years. If you played Quake online in the early days, you were generally not doing it through Windows.
Also I think Warcraft and all them were dos. Battle net? Kali? I dunno, that was my friend's department.
They were called WinModems at the time because they worked via a driver that required Windows to run. I think Linux eventually gained support for some of them, but at the time it was Windows or fuck you. Which I felt personally insulted by, as a modem of all things should work with any OS that could speak RS232 (which was all of them).
Because of that, and because of the added CPU burden, when my 28.8kbps modem went on the fritz I bought an external ZOOM 56kbps modem as a replacement. All the internal modems available at the time were Winmodems.
I wonder how it is nowadays, PCI(e) sound cards are no longer a thing and are mostly on the motherboard (ok well the on-board chips are probably more powerful than chips on sound cards from x years ago), AMD's on-CPU GPU are quite powerful too. My network card^W chip has an option to off-load checksum calculations.
Seems like there's enough spare CPU cycles even if some of them have been used for your written-in-Javascript IDE and written-in-Javascript messaging client.
It's less about total cycles and more about scheduling. You don't really want a real-time or low latency thing like sound to get preempted by another process.
One of the problems with WinModems was they were sensitive to CPU load. In the nominal "browsing" case they might be fine, the average webpage wasn't going to load down the system too much. With something like gaming where the system was more stressed the modem could have weird latency issues or the driver could even crash.
People just expect things to be integrated. Even Wi-Fi is, although it's probably typically an M.2 card. I have a <2000 computer that had both integrated audio and video, and it's kind-of become a norm.
Integrated sound cards are way more susceptive to interference, though, and the quality suffers a bit. They're merely good enough.
Also, people generally seem to use USB sound cards, as it removes even more room for interference (though my ASUS Xonar Essence STX sounds great already, unlike the integrated solution that transfers power rail and other noise).
It also made your PC slow and crappy in general and they didn't work with real OSes. And they would often fail or crap out when you were doing something else (most windows was still DOS based and not fully multitasking back in those days) Yuck. Bottom of the barrel stuff.
On Windows, yes. On Linux, the proprietary driver was OK (consistently connecting at 48kbps and keeping it for hours), except for the micro-freeze when going off-hook.
I used to dial up to a vax in terminal mode circa 1991 with a 2400 baud modem. But sometimes it would connect at 300.... which was painful. Not to mention there was only limited lines in so it could take a while to get a connection, so even if you did connect at 300, you'd often just put up with it.
Was a cool time, no one really knew anything about the internet then and it felt like this awesome "secret world" that connected you to the rest of the world!
It also felt so much different to use a computer. Like, even my computers in 1996-97-98 felt like a different sort of beast. The software was very self-contained, and even as late as 2000 you could use a computer exclusively offline and never really feel like you were missing much.
Like, encyclopedias came on CDs (sometimes a pack of CDs lol. I remember having colliers in a 4-disc set). Games had great single player modes and local lan options - and didn't require an internet connection to play. There were lots of simple little toy programs and games, too. None of it required internet connections.
In a way that permanence was nice. If you pull out a 90s computer and load it up with 90s games, you still get the exact same experience you did back then. I think that's part of the appeal of people collecting vintage computers - I even seen teenagers enjoying that these days lol.
But yea, connecting to the internet felt a little like a ritual and the content felt like it had so much more flavor.
Like, people writing silly things on a geocities/angelfire/members.aol site, joining a webring, creating pages with tacky backgrounds and flashing gif accents. It was more fun to find out what funny fantasy world AquaHorse1998 was writing about on their angelfire site, than to see boring pictures of a dog on Facebook that Jenny from Ohio posted. (And it's the same person lol)
In the mid 80s I used to pay $6.25 an hour (plus phone fees, which ran hundreds of dollars a month for calls to a local number) to connect to Compuserve at 300 baud!
I remember those days but not the actual costs because I wasn't paying the bills! There were a few occasional months where I was in pretty big trouble for dialing up long distance BBSs or being on the local BBS for too long and racking up exorbitant phone bills.
A few years back I was telling a guy I payed $300 for like a 250MB drive and thought I will never need another drive again, I'll never run out of room again.
The guy then told me that he payed $800 for a 2400 baud modem.....
The very first modem I ever owned had a max speed of 300 baud. It was one of those Bell modems with the rubber cups you inserted the handset of the phone into.
Modem manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place back then. It was already expensive to have hardware chips that supported every available connection protocol, and the extra horsepower you needed to support, say, BTLZ error correction had to come from somewhere. So either add more hardware to the modem, or offload that work to the slow computer CPUs of the late 90s (when Winmodems first came out) which weren't up for the task.
I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The best I could do for my users then was to configure their init strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error correction.
Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned.
He got banned several months later. Difficult to see why (maybe posts removed)? But a lot of people used "password" or whatever as their password in 2001, so not unusual to see old accounts axed.
Definitely, dude. You were much more likely to get a stable and reliable connection from a hardware modem at a slower speed than from a soft modem that was trying for 56 kbits on a bad voice line.
If anyone wants to brush up on their understanding of the Nyquist theorem, give yourself homework to find out why the highest speed ever offered on analog phone lines was 56 kbits. That's a nice Rabbit Hole to tour.
Heh, where I lived 56k modems were useless. The telephone infrastructure was already using some kind of cheat where they effectively doubled up the number of voice calls that went over a single wire (and I can't for the life of me remember what this is called now). The most you could ever get would be 28.8, but more likely you'd get 24,000.
This wasn't quite doubling. Five out of six frames were sampled at full 8-bit resolution, while the remaining frame was sampled at 7-bit resolution (hence the "robbed bit"). The "doubling" is probably that you could run 24 digital lines with the 7/8-bit encoding, over the wires used by just two analog phone lines.
In 2000 or 2001 I ended up having to crash at my high school one night. Rehearsal had gone late, till 11 or midnight, and I was stuck. Not that big of a deal, the drama department had everything I needed. Showers, beds, clothes. It was fine. They also had a couple computers to control lights and sound stuff, but they weren't connected to the internet. No worries I thought, I know all my family's dial up info, I can log in via that. So I did. I was a little perplexed that it came in under speed (56k modem, but I was only able to get a 28k or 22k baud connection. I forget exactly but it was somewhere in that range). I was curious enough that I asked around with the IT staff the next day and got confused stares all around, apparently with the types of phone lines the school had a dial up connection shouldn't have been possible AT ALL. This was some sort of big deal to the point they even had to follow up with their telephone provider and there was some question about if they were bilking the school out of paying for a certain kind of connection but delivering something else. I was obviously cut out of the loop at that point but it led to some high drama behind the scenes.
My guess is the telecom vendor your school selected told your school’s IT and purchasing teams that their new phone lines cannot handle modem connections, so they would be obligated to buy a separate IP connectivity service from the same vendor.
Being the early 90s, technical expertise about Internet connectivity was sparse and they most likely entered into a contract with this vendor on the strength of their statement.
They were now surprised to find out the truth: that they could’ve kept using their existing paid-for modems instead of upgrading to a new, expensive, high-speed Internet, access circuit tied to a multi-year contract and all the requisite equipment that came along with that.
The school was likely using ISDN or some sort of digital phone setup and you lucked out. Hotels used to have a special data port on the room handset that you could use because the main line was digital (either ISDN or something else). Even then I could typically only get 28-33k, not the 53k (I never, ever got a pure 56k connection).
Cables are rated for data with a certain expectation of abuse. On a straight run, cat-5 UTP and cat-6 UTP are identical even though the former is rated for 100Mps and the latter for 10Gbps.
But if you bend them around a corner and pull the cable tight, the pairs in the cat-5 will become separated while the pairs in the cat-6 will stay mostly paired (electrons running in opposite directions create fields which negate each other, this is spoiled if the stands separate. Then the cable becomes noisy).
It would be similar with baud rates and phone lines. Probably the school's setup wasn't of the sort that could typically handle data, so the telco had offered them some kind of expensive alternative, but the installers had had a gentle touch, so it actually could handle data.
That, or the telco was just lying and trying to sell something the customer didn't need. Wouldn't be the first time that had happened.
I’m not sure I follow. The service was better than expected?
In my experience you would pay for a minimum service. When we paid for 56k dial-up Bell came in and replaced things until we could achieve 56k. It’s just a noise game. So I imagine it’s possible that the existing lines were decent enough to begin with?
This is 20 year old memories so I may have some of the details wrong, but the gist was the school had rolled out an early IP telephony solution and the landlines were just rj-11 patch cables into a monolithic IP telephony box that assigned each line a number and shouldn't have been capable of handling the dial up connection through that
I know it wasn't the same everywhere, but back in 2001 my high school had an IT staff that consisted of a single teacher with no real technical literacy to begin with. There was no real sort of firewall or security, including the computers that were on the internet. It was kind of a different time.
I never had a modem. In 2000 I was attending University living in a student hostel which had Internet by grace of allocated state budget. It was horrifyingly slow. No idea what the original connection was, but distributed through coaxial cable Ethernet to hundreds of students rooms, it was barely usable. Also I had no idea what I was doing, porn was one thing if by that you understand navigating webrings on Altavista and leaving one image to download overnight hoping by morning at least it starts to show something. First time I saw real Internet on my first job in 2001, a satellite downlink connection at 256 Kbit/sec (uplink was a regular modem), I couldn't believe such speed was possible.
On the other hand the local LAN was a nonstop LAN-party, reaching peak usage during exams season, when everyone should have been learning but obviously they were hardly doing that between Counterstrike rounds and such.
My first job was with a local, rural ISP in 2001. I convinced the boss to let me have an additional account and I payed for a second phone line. Initially I used some software (on Windows 2000) to perform modem bonding (shotgun modem) with two modems. Then, eventually upgraded to Diamond Supra Sonic II 112k. It of course never reached 112k obviously but I was riding that high for quite a while.
My first full time job was doing phone tech support for dialup internet users for one of Australia's biggest ISPs in the late 90s. Many of the customers who'd call had just bought a new big-brand desktop PC (most commonly a HP Pavillion) with a winmodem in it, and so our job was to get it to work, even if their phone line was bad, or had other devices (fax machines, alarms, wireless phones) causing interference. We became very very familiar with the AT command sets to adjust the settings on all the different modem models, and with winmodems you'd often just have to slow it right down to 33k, 28k or even less.
Readit News
Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever take for granted!
Finally found the person that figured it out. Computer only had an 8250 UART for the serial port. $35 ISA serial port card with 16550A UART solved it!
You can boil a lot of tech changes down to either A: Let's take this problem that has been solved in hardware and move it to software! and B: Let's take this problem that has been implemented in software and bake it into hardware.
Somehow, A is always a train wreck, and B usually pushes the abstraction stack upward and moves the industry forward. Yet, we as an industry keep trying A and expecting good results.
I remember one time I'd gotten the connection established and they said "now what?", and I said "You've connected to the Internet" and they said "so what do I do now?" They'd gone out and bought the internet package because it was the thing to do, but had no idea what to do with it. I ended up showing them how to go to Google which had only just been released that month.
And I definitely relate to being adverse to hearing a ringing phone
Every time it'd take an hour or more, because you'd tell him to do X, ask him to confirm he'd done X, ask him if he was sure he'd done X, then have him try to go online, and he'd call back and it'd turn out he'd done Y because he "thought it'd work better".
Also, the sheer number of times people who'd get too trigger-happy and start trying to connect before they'd hung up...
What a miserable machine that thing was. It might’ve been an upgrade on paper but between Windows 98 and the terrible hardware it was running on, it was a hopelessly crashy buggy mess that rendered any performance advantages it had over the Mac entirely moot.
Within a span of 6 months we sold it and replaced it with a Dell Dimension 4100 that cost 3x as much and was much much better, especially after replacing its stock 98SE install with Win2K. We never bought bargain basement computers again after that.
Also how the difference between a 1996 computer and a 1999 computer was SUBSTANTIAL.
At some point later, my high school had surplus Powermac 7500/100s that were gifted from Nortel and I managed to snag one, paired it with a USR 56k external modem and it was a million times better than that Celeron econobox.
They often came with nice (Dell rebranded) Trinitron monitors although I think that was usually an upgrade over some base monitor.
http://www.linmodems.org/
https://centralcomputer.com
https://www.microcenter.com
I worked at Egghead Software in high school and managed NFR pricing on Netcom. Egghead was one of the first chains to go under because it couldn't compete with the hypermarts like CompUSA and Fry's Electronics, both of which are now also defunct given way to BestBuy and Amazon.
at a consumer level, the only people that ever knew or cared were people trying to run linux or a bsd. h/w modems operated over a serial port, and didn't require any special kernel support.
Yeah, winmodems were "good enough" for most. But tended to perform worse with noisy phone lines. Which were really common. Which is what the linked article talks about.
Also remember that DOS online gaming was a thing for a few years. If you played Quake online in the early days, you were generally not doing it through Windows.
Also I think Warcraft and all them were dos. Battle net? Kali? I dunno, that was my friend's department.
Dead Comment
Because of that, and because of the added CPU burden, when my 28.8kbps modem went on the fritz I bought an external ZOOM 56kbps modem as a replacement. All the internal modems available at the time were Winmodems.
Seems like there's enough spare CPU cycles even if some of them have been used for your written-in-Javascript IDE and written-in-Javascript messaging client.
One of the problems with WinModems was they were sensitive to CPU load. In the nominal "browsing" case they might be fine, the average webpage wasn't going to load down the system too much. With something like gaming where the system was more stressed the modem could have weird latency issues or the driver could even crash.
Integrated sound cards are way more susceptive to interference, though, and the quality suffers a bit. They're merely good enough.
Also, people generally seem to use USB sound cards, as it removes even more room for interference (though my ASUS Xonar Essence STX sounds great already, unlike the integrated solution that transfers power rail and other noise).
Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud.
LT Win Modem.
Was a cool time, no one really knew anything about the internet then and it felt like this awesome "secret world" that connected you to the rest of the world!
Like, encyclopedias came on CDs (sometimes a pack of CDs lol. I remember having colliers in a 4-disc set). Games had great single player modes and local lan options - and didn't require an internet connection to play. There were lots of simple little toy programs and games, too. None of it required internet connections.
In a way that permanence was nice. If you pull out a 90s computer and load it up with 90s games, you still get the exact same experience you did back then. I think that's part of the appeal of people collecting vintage computers - I even seen teenagers enjoying that these days lol.
But yea, connecting to the internet felt a little like a ritual and the content felt like it had so much more flavor.
Like, people writing silly things on a geocities/angelfire/members.aol site, joining a webring, creating pages with tacky backgrounds and flashing gif accents. It was more fun to find out what funny fantasy world AquaHorse1998 was writing about on their angelfire site, than to see boring pictures of a dog on Facebook that Jenny from Ohio posted. (And it's the same person lol)
I really miss that feeling, it's a rarity nowadays.
The guy then told me that he payed $800 for a 2400 baud modem.....
The very first modem I ever owned had a max speed of 300 baud. It was one of those Bell modems with the rubber cups you inserted the handset of the phone into.
Yes, I'm old.
I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The best I could do for my users then was to configure their init strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error correction.
Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned.
Deleted Comment
If anyone wants to brush up on their understanding of the Nyquist theorem, give yourself homework to find out why the highest speed ever offered on analog phone lines was 56 kbits. That's a nice Rabbit Hole to tour.
The voice passband in the old telephone system is 3 kHz. And 60 dB SNR average over the passband was typical for a clear voice channel:
https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dia...
This wasn't quite doubling. Five out of six frames were sampled at full 8-bit resolution, while the remaining frame was sampled at 7-bit resolution (hence the "robbed bit"). The "doubling" is probably that you could run 24 digital lines with the 7/8-bit encoding, over the wires used by just two analog phone lines.
Being the early 90s, technical expertise about Internet connectivity was sparse and they most likely entered into a contract with this vendor on the strength of their statement.
They were now surprised to find out the truth: that they could’ve kept using their existing paid-for modems instead of upgrading to a new, expensive, high-speed Internet, access circuit tied to a multi-year contract and all the requisite equipment that came along with that.
But if you bend them around a corner and pull the cable tight, the pairs in the cat-5 will become separated while the pairs in the cat-6 will stay mostly paired (electrons running in opposite directions create fields which negate each other, this is spoiled if the stands separate. Then the cable becomes noisy).
It would be similar with baud rates and phone lines. Probably the school's setup wasn't of the sort that could typically handle data, so the telco had offered them some kind of expensive alternative, but the installers had had a gentle touch, so it actually could handle data.
That, or the telco was just lying and trying to sell something the customer didn't need. Wouldn't be the first time that had happened.
In my experience you would pay for a minimum service. When we paid for 56k dial-up Bell came in and replaced things until we could achieve 56k. It’s just a noise game. So I imagine it’s possible that the existing lines were decent enough to begin with?
On the other hand the local LAN was a nonstop LAN-party, reaching peak usage during exams season, when everyone should have been learning but obviously they were hardly doing that between Counterstrike rounds and such.
Deleted Comment