Memories of using a < 56K MODEM on any desktop or laptop

5rtytry56

When did you last actually use a Modem in a computer?
What did you use it for?

I used a 3COM 56K modem to play MS Flight Simulator 98 online in the late 90s.
Actually, 56K modems generally were connected up to a speed of about 44K.

I know that apart from 3COM/USB robotics, most other modem manufacturers tended to make variable quality modems.

Some modems needed to be replaced over and over again - I had an aquaintance who went through a line of 6 or so back in the day.

These were the days of the 'narrowband' for ya. I would'nt expect the younger boardsies to know what that means.

ItHurtsWhenIP

I last used a modem in 2008. I had a one-way Satellite connection with SkyDSL, so I got my 1Mbps download from orbit and my upload was over dial-up. There was a data limit of 500MB per month :eek::eek::eek: on that as far as I can remember.

When our FWA provider showed up with 3Mbps/1Mbps, I ditched that dish PDQ!!!

PropJoe10

Probably in about 2005, my grandparents had an old Windows 98 computer hooked up to a dialup connection. My grandfather liked the Microsoft Flight Simulator games so I used to spend time setting that up for hi. Their dialup connection topped out at around 16k Truly golden times!

TerrorFirmer

I think about 2002 or so, right up until the switch to 1MB broadband I was using it to mostly play Unreal Tournament/Wolfenstein online, occassionally download files - back when downloading the latest version of Day of Defeat or Counter Strike meant leaving on the PC overnight for a 120mb file.

Mycroft H

Waiting until 6pm when it was off peak and cheap

5rtytry56

Mycroft H wrote: »

Waiting until 6pm when it was off peak and cheap

Believe it or not, I worked on a British Telecom callcentre line, which dealt with Evenings and Weekend modem queries (forget the proper name of the account) around 2001

Mycroft H

I would believe it, we were on dial up in the sticks until 2008. Initially a 3g modem and then ADSL in 2009.

deecom

The noise, that crackle whirr sound... Agrghhhh!!! :eek:

Hellrazer

I remember playing the original battlefield 1942 on dial up.
Great fun altogether.
And then theyd release a 500mb patch!!!!
One of the lads in TiG had broadband at the time and we all used to get him to download the patch and burn it to disc and post them to us.

To think now I have 360 meg and still give out when a game patch of 5+ gigs has to download!!!

Feeling old now posting this!!

PropJoe10

I remember working for a call centre in Waterford (which will remain nameless) and selling people dialup packages. Also, having people ringing in that were on a plan for a few hours a month and had left their computer connected to the dialup on their second phone line (a lot of British people had separate phone lines for their computer in those days) for an entire month.

£1500 bill for the month in some extreme cases!

5rtytry56

Callcentre was Waterford based? Too obvious.

SickBoy

Can't remember if it was my k56flex or v.92 modem but I could tell how fast my connection speed was going to be based on the dial-up noise.
Good times!

PropJoe10

5rtytry56 wrote: »

Callcentre was Waterford based? Too obvious.

Lots of call centres in Waterford! Always has been!

Alun

Lightweights all of you, 300 baud acoustic couplers is where it's at

Mycroft H

Hellrazer wrote: »

I remember playing the original battlefield 1942 on dial up.
Great fun altogether.
And then theyd release a 500mb patch!!!!
One of the lads in TiG had broadband at the time and we all used to get him to download the patch and burn it to disc and post them to us.

To think now I have 360 meg and still give out when a game patch of 5+ gigs has to download!!!

Feeling old now posting this!!

Ahhh snap. I played 1942 on dialup too. PIII on W98

Blitkreig II and AOEII. AOEII had a funny online matchmaking serivce, can't remember it now.

It was painful in the later part of the 2000's. Pages would time out before they'd finished loading.

mordeith

I remember using my Oceanfree CD to get online. I was still on a 56k line when I opened my Steam account! I also had a few select 30sec avi files downloaded that in a playlist rewarded one with an adult only scene. :-)

whizbang

And then someone in the family picked up the phone ... Damn. Download failed.

demanufactured

Ah the golden years of the Internet.
When it took 30 mins to download a single mp3 over napster

I used a very cool chat/gaming software in 98-2000 called mPlayer/ hearme.com
Got later bought out by gamespy
It was awesome...live voice chat....Web cams..playing quake 2 with people in the chat rooms.....

BionicRasher

Nostalgia - great
I opened an Internet cafe in 1998 with 2 Gateway tower PCs
I dont remember an specifics of the modem as it was supplied by Eircom (or probably Telecom Eireann at that stage)
We used to get tourists in looking to set up Outlook Express with thier accounts so they could send a few emails - I dont know if POP email was all that advanced or popular at that stage.
I had an old Oceanfree account for email and lots of American tourists had AOL I seem to remember

We eventually got an ISDN set up installed and that increased the speeds dramatically where a customer could send an email in a matter of minutes (maybe 5 or 6) rather than having to wait 20 mins for the buzzing modem to do its stuff. I do seem to remember the ISDN box on the wall made a lot of clicking noises however!
We made a small fortune as customers had to pay for an hour (or two!) on the PC to ensure they had time to actually get anything accomplished!!!

mada999

jaysis old school...

cant remember when the last time was but i remember the phone line being upstairs in my folks room....

when they went out i had to lug my TFT monitor, my fujitsu tower, my keyboard, my iol mousepad and my mouse to and then to have to wait 10s of minutes to download a porn .jpeg and then scroll to a few and then have a **** before they came home.... tough times these youngsters are soooooooooo lucky....

should have just got page 3 out instead.....but those days were exciting times...have a **** and then go read some Encarta.. those in fact were the days, my friend

TerrorFirmer

whizbang wrote: »

And then someone in the family picked up the phone ... Damn. Download failed.

Those in the know always used download managers like Filezilla :cool:

Mycroft H

TFT? Someone had money.

Rocked the CRT until 06 or so.

December 2005 personally but still have to occasionally test modems for faxing on new servers!

I used to live in an area with an exchange that was fed via a radio link. No V.90 so most connections were between 28.8 and 33.6! I also moved into an apartment in Drumcondra back jn September 2008 and the phone line only reached 16.8! Thank feck NTL (as they were at the time) became available that month.

Sierra Oscar

2004, family home didn't have broadband until then. :eek:

Simi

We had a 56k modem right up until I left for college in 2005. Then dsl came!

I gamed on it, downloaded gigabytes of music over the years, had to activate steam using it. A process that took nearly 24hrs by the time all the patches for counterstrike condition zero I think it was? downloaded.

It was incredibly frustrating, but the internet was a far more exciting experience back then. Before that oceanfree CD, I was limited to a few mins at a time. Then when we got esat no limits I was in heaven.

FanadMan

Remember amazing my parents by being able to do a video call to my brother in the US. They were able to see the grandkids albeit in a small and blocky window

Used to work for Dell tech support when the US Robotics 56k WinModem came out. There was some severe feckup with the drivers and Windows 95 and 98. We used to spend ages on the phone talking customers through removing and reinstalling. Having to search for and delete files, hidden files and registry entries and then reinstall the whole thing again. Then promising a callback to the customer to check that the bloody thing was working again. And we used to get weather updates if there was lightning storms - they'rd be calls from people saying that their computer wouldn't start up. We'd have to ask if there was lightning in their area since the computer worked and if there was, we'd just send them to their home insurance cos the computer was screwed :mad:

5rtytry56

Remember that I uploaded a .wmv video to my homepage.eircom.net account in 2004, by modem. This was a recorded video of one of my flights in MS FLight Simulator. The other memorable thing was this was pre - YouTube days.

bonzodog2

There was a type of internal modem called an AMR (Audio Modem Riser), that used the sound card to do some of the work. I remember getting one to work in Linux, can't remember which distro, but IIRC the DE was KDE2. Back then I had an oceanfree mail account (still do last time I checked!). One phone bill I had used 90 punt on 1p/min modem calls.
I also used to hate feeling that I was paying for the bandwidth to download advert images, so I wrote a very basic proxy server in Java that intercepted image requests to known hosting sites, and return locally to the browser an image of my own.

MisterDrak

I remember downloading an original copy of Doom way back around 95 / 96 on a 19,200 bit's/s modem. The copy was around 7mb, and was interrupted and re-started a few times.
I think it took most of the night as a result, but when I got the game down and running I though it was the coolest thing ever.

Squall Leonhart

I remember using the IOL CD to get our dial up to work. The father used to go mad when he'd get to work the next day and find out one of the lads was trying to call him all evening about the sunday paper crossword only to get an engaged tone.... and him stuck on 6-across

Squall Leonhart

whizbang

US Robotics 56k WinModem

Cheap dirt!

Most of the time the host PC wasn't fast enough to run these...
Still, at the time it go me up to 33k, thanks to those registry tweaks, but only if there was nothing else at all running on the pc.

pajor

I reckon it was last in 2007 or 2008 at my parents' house in county Waterford. My dad had a Packard Bell laptop (Windows XP), which I think was the last computer the family had that had a modem port. Which incidentally had the worst graphics card I have ever seen. I remember using the IOL CD to 're-install' the connection many times. Until then realised that there was a simple way to type in the eircom dial-up number and connect. Would always connect at 26.4, 28.8 or if lucky 32kpbs. :cool: I convinced my parents to buy onspeed cos it would speed up the internet so much. It sort of did.

Dial-up did not slow down chats on MSN so that was okay. My other main use was looking up game cheats. Which could be quite a slow process.

They now have satellite broadband, no ADSL even available yet. Supposedly eir will bring fibre next year.

5rtytry56

whizbang wrote: »

Cheap dirt!

Most of the time the host PC wasn't fast enough to run these...
Still, at the time it go me up to 33k, thanks to those registry tweaks, but only if there was nothing else at all running on the pc.

US Robotics 56k modem was cheap dirt?

Google the

Lucent Whitehorse

or other modems which would drop the line.

Dell manufactured their own modem as well.....this had an utter stinking reputation.

unkel

5rtytry56 wrote: »

I used a 3COM 56K modem to play MS Flight Simulator 98 online in the late 90s.

Are you sure you weren't still using a 56k modem until at least a few years after that?

Nobody in Ireland had broadband in their family home in the late 90s. I used ISDN myself and one way satellite (56k up, broadband down) until I finally got NTL cable broadband in their second test phase back in Lucan in '01 I think. Knocklyon was the first test area in Ireland a few months before and I was so jealous of them! Only a few very small areas of Dublin had cable broadband then and even fewer people had DSL

Ireland was on a par with several African countries up to about 2004-2005, we were so far behind the rest of Europe it made even our roads (hardly any motorways, also hard to believe now) look modern :mad:

Jakey Rolling

Alun wrote:

Lightweights all of you, 300 baud acoustic couplers is where it's at

Used one of these around 1993 in the ar*e end of Australia to upload survey data.

Most recently stuck using dial-up in rural Tipperary in 2010, 3g coverage was unusable. Still can't get a landline and last time I checked with Comreg the minimum USO was still 28kbps.

unkel

Dug this up

Linky

NTL only started cable broadband in early 2002! It must have been later in '02 for me in Lucan so. I was delighed when I got it. Their top offering, 512kbps down, effectively 12-15 times as fast as the fastest dial up :cool:

14 years later and my download speed is nearly 1000 times faster again

5rtytry56

unkel wrote: »

Are you sure you weren't still using a 56k modem until at least a few years after that?

mmmm...
This is true believe or not: I stopped playing games online after fs98. I owned fs2000 the one with the concorde on the cover - we all know why ms removed this from subsequent versions, 2002 2004 and FS X: I've never played these with other simmers from my own living room. Yes I was a member of the ifsd. And pc pilots club of Ireland. But life always got in the way.
Back to topic.The last modem used by me is still there in my Lenovo P500. This thing is over 8 years old now. The modem has'nt been used for the past four years.

Mycroft H

Jakey Rolling wrote: »

Used one of these around 1993 in the ar*e end of Australia to upload survey data.

Most recently stuck using dial-up in rural Tipperary in 2010, 3g coverage was unusable. Still can't get a landline and last time I checked with Comreg the minimum USO was still 28kbps.

It still is 28.8kbps