st31276a wrote on 2024-08-17, 06:39:

I thought the dude was trolling us with that other thread.

After reading through all the replies I thought: hmmm, funny nobody suggested a winmodem yet.

Although it probably is the worst piece of hardware ever, it would actually complete the 1998 experience. I remembered how I suffered with one, with the stupid thing going *clip* and dropping the line every time win98 gets a hiccup, which, as most who know it will know, is frequently.

Sorry if my reply had made you feel that I was targeting you specifically; I was complaining about how disappointing and frustrating his threads were in general.

We knew the thread opener wanted to experience games in the 1990s but had a less than optimal computer (Dimension L1000R with Intel CA810 "Cayman" MB without AGP or ISA), together with limited hardware experience or budget. That's perfectly fine; everyone started as a newbie.

So helps went on with two possible directions:
1. Stick with that L1000R and find a PCI sound card (with software modding if necessary) that can provide the best possible DOS game experience.
2. Get rid of that L1000R and find another affordable system that is more suitable for DOS gaming.

Many cordial users have provided very useful information but the OP keeps changing his (?) goals. Along with his peculiar "language styles," others' motivation gradually waned, if not transformed into tiredness. Admin and users persuaded him to change his "style" but received limited, if any, improvements. And VOGONS is not the only place with similar thoughts.

Seeing the OP is already busy playing various mods of Doom / Doom II successfully I'd say there's no urgent need to dive too deep on the Winmodem subject anyway.

st31276a wrote on 2024-08-17, 06:39:

After reading through all the replies I thought: hmmm, funny nobody suggested a winmodem yet.

Although it probably is the worst piece of hardware ever, it would actually complete the 1998 experience. I remembered how I suffered with one, with the stupid thing going *clip* and dropping the line every time win98 gets a hiccup, which, as most who know it will know, is frequently.

1997 might have an IBM Mwave card for you; I think those may have gotten decent on ThinkPads with time, but the drivers on Aptivas in 1997 probably made them worse than Winmodems...

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-17, 10:55:

Sorry if my reply had made you feel that I was targeting you specifically; I was complaining about how disappointing and frustra […]
Show full quote

st31276a wrote on 2024-08-17, 06:39:

I thought the dude was trolling us with that other thread.

After reading through all the replies I thought: hmmm, funny nobody suggested a winmodem yet.

Although it probably is the worst piece of hardware ever, it would actually complete the 1998 experience. I remembered how I suffered with one, with the stupid thing going *clip* and dropping the line every time win98 gets a hiccup, which, as most who know it will know, is frequently.

Sorry if my reply had made you feel that I was targeting you specifically; I was complaining about how disappointing and frustrating his threads were in general.

We knew the thread opener wanted to experience games in the 1990s but had a less than optimal computer (Dimension L1000R with Intel CA810 "Cayman" MB without AGP or ISA), together with limited hardware experience or budget. That's perfectly fine; everyone started as a newbie.

So helps went on with two possible directions:
1. Stick with that L1000R and find a PCI sound card (with software modding if necessary) that can provide the best possible DOS game experience.
2. Get rid of that L1000R and find another affordable system that is more suitable for DOS gaming.

Many cordial users have provided very useful information but the OP keeps changing his (?) goals. Along with his peculiar "language styles," others' motivation gradually waned, if not transformed into tiredness. Admin and users persuaded him to change his "style" but received limited, if any, improvements. And VOGONS is not the only place with similar thoughts.

Seeing the OP is already busy playing various mods of Doom / Doom II successfully I'd say there's no urgent need to dive too deep on the Winmodem subject anyway.

Damn
I've been discovered

The thing I find most hilarious/ironic/devious about winmodems is bleeding edge users upgrading from 2400, to 4800, to 9600, to 14,400, to 28,800, to 33k, then finally to 56k and right at the end of the road there, being sold winmodems on the promise of "all you need is new drivers to support new encoding standards!" implying they would support what came AFTER 56k in analog phone subscriber line modems ... which was... which was... that's right a big fat nothing... I guess some winmodem early adopters (and ppl with hardware modems with flash eprom) got to go from kflex or V.90 to V.92 but that was it, hit the buffer stops and the brick wall behind them, dead end.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-17, 18:16:

The thing I find most hilarious/ironic/devious about winmodems is bleeding edge users upgrading from 2400, to 4800, to 9600, to 14,400, to 28,800, to 33k, then finally to 56k and right at the end of the road there, being sold winmodems on the promise of "all you need is new drivers to support new encoding standards!" implying they would support what came AFTER 56k in analog phone subscriber line modems ... which was... which was... that's right a big fat nothing... I guess some winmodem early adopters (and ppl with hardware modems with flash eprom) got to go from kflex or V.90 to V.92 but that was it, hit the buffer stops and the brick wall behind them, dead end.

A fair number of hardware modems were upgradeable to 56K . I recall, for example, having a v.34 USR modem that got upgraded to X2 and later v.90, and worked fine. As for winmodems/softmodems, AFAICR, the wave hit the market when K56Flex and X2 competing 56K standards were already a thing (1997ish). Again, AFAICR, a large percentage of K56Flex and X2 compatible modems (both software AND hardware based ones) were announced as being upgradeable to the yet to be released v.90 standard.

And, IMHO, controllerless DSP based modem chipsets from the likes of Lucent were rather decent. HSP (host signal processing) chips from PCTel and Motorola SM56 ones were really crappy if you dud not have a powerful enough machine with a decent FPU and MMX.

If I remember correctly , AMD K6 family CPUs were not recommended by vendors for use with Motorola SM56 based soft modems. That did not prevent shops from building and selling such combos.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-17, 18:16:

The thing I find most hilarious/ironic/devious about winmodems is bleeding edge users upgrading from 2400, to 4800, to 9600, to 14,400, to 28,800, to 33k, then finally to 56k and right at the end of the road there, being sold winmodems on the promise of "all you need is new drivers to support new encoding standards!" implying they would support what came AFTER 56k in analog phone subscriber line modems ... which was... which was... that's right a big fat nothing... I guess some winmodem early adopters (and ppl with hardware modems with flash eprom) got to go from kflex or V.90 to V.92 but that was it, hit the buffer stops and the brick wall behind them, dead end.

Not sure I'd agree - there was a big period in the middle of the x2/K56Flex format war where modems got to go from one of those two to V90, which I think was quite important...

It's funny how that whole format war has been forgotten. Some ISPs had both X2 and K56Flex (with, obviously, separate numbers/pools for each), I think most OEM systems erred in the K56Flex direction because K56Flex people sold elcheapo modems cheaper than USR, etc.

Also, I suspect most Winmodems were not purchased as bleeding edge upgrades. Most were likely in OEM systems. Oh LT Winmodem, how I remember thee...
(Interestingly, I am pretty sure the Dells/Gateways of the world would sell you a hardware modem as an upgrade, and were in fact slower to adopt Winmodems, whereas the retail OEMs were all Winmodems all the time)

People actually upgrading modems outside the computer replacement cycle would, I think, have been more likely to buy decent modems. But if you were buying your IBM Aptiva-nee-Acer or Packard Hell or Compaq, oops...

It was a big deal and big noise, but it was only 6 months in 1997 I think, duelling standards to V90, not really a big period. Then all the dotcom reorganisations, busts and buyouts were a convenient excuse not to follow through with anything a couple of years later when customers began to wonder when their next speed bump was happening.

IIRC Demon kept a Kflex pool up just into the 2000s because some customers preferred it, I think because V90 dropped them back by 1 kbit or something, don't remember full deets.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-17, 23:47:

It was a big deal and big noise, but it was only 6 months in 1997 I think, duelling standards to V90, not really a big period.

According to Wikipedia, it was over 18 months - X2 and K56Flex modems reached consumers in February 1997, while the V90 standard was approved in September 1998. I don't remember if there was much 'v90 draft' equipment or if people just stuck to X2/K56Flex until the final standard was finalized and whatnot.

And back then, 18 months was a long time. In that time, processors went from 200MHz Pentium MMXes on the top end to the 450MHz Deschutes PII.

And people were absolutely starved for bandwidth. This was peak era for dialup Internet... and while I think things were different in Europe or even in the U.S. (where you had a lot more national ISPs with outsourced modem pools), here there were dozens of small dialup ISPs all aggressively competing. Picking the 'wrong' side between X2 and K56flex could be... highly consequential.. for those guys.

Funny thing is, I remember not caring that much about v90 - by the time the v90 standard was finalized, etc, many people, at least on the enthusiast side, were months away from their first DSL/cable. Here at least, 1998 you were a serious early adopter for DSL/cable, 1999 the phone company/cable companies expanded the footprints, reduced pricing (and speeds), and it went a bit more mainstream.

Winmodems were much hated here in the UK early on. It was a selling point in PCs from Time and Tiny that they had full 56k hardware modems.

In the UK there were a fair few "local" ISPs competing in their areas, but the modem speeds changed quite fast and most of them didnt survive the speed wars.
I think there was a youtube video about it all a few years ago but I cant remember the name of the channel even.

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-18, 01:18:

And people were absolutely starved for bandwidth. This was peak era for dialup Internet... and while I think things were different in Europe or even in the U.S. (where you had a lot more national ISPs with outsourced modem pools), here there were dozens of small dialup ISPs all aggressively competing. Picking the 'wrong' side between X2 and K56flex could be... highly consequential.. for those guys.

Funny thing is, I remember not caring that much about v90 - by the time the v90 standard was finalized, etc, many people, at least on the enthusiast side, were months away from their first DSL/cable. Here at least, 1998 you were a serious early adopter for DSL/cable, 1999 the phone company/cable companies expanded the footprints, reduced pricing (and speeds), and it went a bit more mainstream.

I was a late adapter of both: kept using 33.6 kbps until 1999 and got the first cable modem in 2002. IIRC earliest cable modem was downstream-only and still required a traditional landline modem to handle upstream, which was an unnecessary hassle. I waited until bidirectional cable modem service was readily available for subscription.

Both the external 33.6k and the internal (PCI controllerless) 56k were still kept functional just in case if needed for sending / receiving fax (still an important method of communication in Japan) before I received / acquired four ThinkPads with built-in modems in quick succession. 😅

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-18, 01:18:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-17, 23:47:

It was a big deal and big noise, but it was only 6 months in 1997 I think, duelling standards to V90, not really a big period.

According to Wikipedia, it was over 18 months - X2 and K56Flex modems reached consumers in February 1997, while the V90 standard was approved in September 1998. I don't remember if there was much 'v90 draft' equipment or if people just stuck to X2/K56Flex until the final standard was finalized and whatnot.

Announcement of K56flex to final final V.90 wasn't what I was talking about, it was more like ISPs didn't actually implement any 56k other than small scale testing until 4th quarter 97, so it's pretty much vapor for the average user until that happened then preliminary V.90 came out in Feb 98 and prelim V.90 firmwares were happening pretty quick after, with testing happing in August PC Mag issues... so delivered 2 months prior probably. Anyway, the period of noise was far greater than things actually happening with hype starting a year out or more from any real implementation. Wikipedia may find dates that put the span at 3 years, may cherry pick them to 18 months, or whatever, but on the ground it was basically 6 months where you weren't sure you had the "winner" or there was gonna be a proper standard, and talk about the standard was on the newsgroups late 97. Reminder that 56k wasn't 56k until you connected to a special ISP bonded modem, so anything until ISPs went live with them was 33k with delusions of grandeur.

dormcat wrote on 2024-08-18, 02:45:

I was a late adapter of both: kept using 33.6 kbps until 1999 and got the first cable modem in 2002. IIRC earliest cable modem was downstream-only and still required a traditional landline modem to handle upstream, which was an unnecessary hassle. I waited until bidirectional cable modem service was readily available for subscription.

I think the cable company here (Rogers) was ahead of the curve on rebuilding everything for bidirectional; I don't think downstream-only was ever offered here.

Needing to use the modem for upstream would have been... annoying. Half the point of cable Internet was not to tie up the family phone line anymore!

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-18, 03:10:

Reminder that 56k wasn't 56k until you connected to a special ISP bonded modem, so anything until ISPs went live with them was 33k with delusions of grandeur.

56K required the ISP to be getting digital circuits (23-channel PRIs) from the phone company. Those went into terminal servers that could serve all 23 channels, and indeed, bigger-capacity terminal servers were one of the things being rolled out in that era (I thiiiiink there may even have been terminal servers that could serve a channelized DS3's worth of inbound lines).

Interestingly, the ISP I was using was founded in 1996, IIRC, and always had digital circuits. I remember signing up as one of their first 500 customers and being very surprised they only had 69 lines. The other thing I remember is that they were expected to go K56flex because the vendor for their terminal servers was on the K56 side, and instead they ended up running X2 on the main number and setting up a separate smaller pool for K56flex. Never found out what caused the switch.

An ISP founded a few years earlier that was actually using banks of physical modems with individual analog lines would have needed a lot more upgrades for 56K. I remember seeing photos of those ISPs' equipment with just rows and rows of USR modems. Very poor usage of space compared to the channelized digital solutions... so really, the way business was booming for a dialup ISP in 1997, probably made sense to move to the much more space-efficient 56K equipment.

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-18, 04:05:

56K required the ISP to be getting digital circuits (23-channel PRIs) from the phone company. Those went into terminal servers t […]
Show full quote

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-08-18, 03:10:

Reminder that 56k wasn't 56k until you connected to a special ISP bonded modem, so anything until ISPs went live with them was 33k with delusions of grandeur.

56K required the ISP to be getting digital circuits (23-channel PRIs) from the phone company. Those went into terminal servers that could serve all 23 channels, and indeed, bigger-capacity terminal servers were one of the things being rolled out in that era (I thiiiiink there may even have been terminal servers that could serve a channelized DS3's worth of inbound lines).

Interestingly, the ISP I was using was founded in 1996, IIRC, and always had digital circuits. I remember signing up as one of their first 500 customers and being very surprised they only had 69 lines. The other thing I remember is that they were expected to go K56flex because the vendor for their terminal servers was on the K56 side, and instead they ended up running X2 on the main number and setting up a separate smaller pool for K56flex. Never found out what caused the switch.

An ISP founded a few years earlier that was actually using banks of physical modems with individual analog lines would have needed a lot more upgrades for 56K. I remember seeing photos of those ISPs' equipment with just rows and rows of USR modems. Very poor usage of space compared to the channelized digital solutions... so really, the way business was booming for a dialup ISP in 1997, probably made sense to move to the much more space-efficient 56K equipment.

I wouldnt usually bother with this but people might in the future use this to get some factual information to build a system so I will.

56k doesnt require a digital circuit to work, it will work at 33.6k on all analogue circuits. But to get 56k speeds you will need a digital circuit at the ISP end. (I will say here to again be technically correct that the V.90 and V.92 standards state a 56k modem isnt capable of originating a 56k connection, they can only receive it, they send at 33.6)
And dont forget the connection was asynchronous, which means the speed up and down wasnt equal... You downloaded faster than you uploaded, and that was because the 56k speed couldnt survive the analogue to digital conversion but it could survive the digital to analogue conversion.

There is a way, a very elaborate way, to set up a fully working 56k network at home. But it would be very expensive. (I know because I did it and in all honesty it wasnt worth the cost. read below for reasons)
6 or 7 years ago it was over £2500 to set up, and that cost would only have increased in time. There are much cheaper ways to get it set up but the transfer speeds are limited to 33.6kbps.

My advice to anybody reading this would be to set up a Cisco SPA122 ATA.
You configure it to forward its calls from one port to the other and then all you have to do is plug one PC in one port (via a modem) and the server in the other port (via a modem, with TS configured) and the PC will be able to dial up the server, log in and then get the network connectivity from that server (via its LAN connection to your home network).

That ATA costs £30-50. the two modems you will need can take any shape or form, they can be serial, PCI or modern USB... A Winmodem will work too. and the two computers can be VMs or physical machines it doesnt matter.
That is the cheapest way to get a "dial up experience"

Which if youre reading this forum that is what youre looking for...

I remember using 33.6 ISA Sportster for years. For months I searched for a way to upgrade it for free. Finally I found some exe file, which was a dialog window with U.S. Robotics branding in with text in some asian codepage my system couldn't render properly. Sigh, hit the biggest button, it does something, restart, V.90 achieved.

This was around 2000/1 when this was largely obsolete and V.90 did nothing substantial for me bcz most of the usage was sharing files over IRC, and now I have a slower upload rate.

In any case if you must experience this pain again, just setup and connect through a Linux dialin box with USB/serial and cheap external modem. You can set up a VM for this on your main PC.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-08-14, 00:53:

I donno I kind of miss modems. Not for internet but for multiplayer games or a way to trasfer files to older laptops I can see a […]
Show full quote

I donno I kind of miss modems.
Not for internet but for multiplayer games or a way to trasfer files to older laptops I can see a use for them (or null modem but that's not as cool)

This is the setup I'm thinking of doing. He's also linked a few other guides "down below" as they say
https://youtu.be/AEiYyMwW8gY?si=X35L4WIFs-TAj-iZ

Other video/guides to review....
CRD's - https://youtu.be/EGFIEF6siIE
RetroByte's - https://youtu.be/Je8lwcUPBys