[rescue] FW: WTT: 1.5G of PC2700 for 1G of PC100

[Bill Bradford]

On Thu, May 01, 2008 at 04:57:56PM -0700, Skeezics Boondoggle wrote:
> It was always astonishing to start powering the modems back on at
> 3:30-4AM on a Sunday and see them start to fill up almost as quickly
> as they finished initializing.  "Don't these people have lives?" asked
> the guys who were there flying on caffeine patching SunOS4 kernels at
> 4AM on a Sunday... ah, 1995.  Back when you could actually get a tan
> from the Blinky Lights(tm) in the racks and racks of modems, and four
> T1's were more than enough bandwidth for 25,000 dialup users...

In '96, ioNET had a remote office in Tulsa (we were in OKC) and had one guy
up there who did sales, tech support, etc, for all our Tulsa users.  By this
time we had the US Robotics modem banks (what was it, six or eight modems
on a card?  Fed the box with an ISDN PRI).

The Windows-based remote control software for the modem banks let you
manually toggle the LEDs for each line, independent of the actual state of
the connection.

We got bored one day, and went about doing things that bored geeks will do.

Two hours later, we got a call from our buddy in Tulsa, who had looked over
to see the LED matrix on the modem bank spelling out "HI JEFF" 8-)

The "glory days" of the ISP business were great.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford 
Houston, Texas