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Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. 
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Nov 9, 2022 09:36
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barbecue at the folks posted:Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. We had it at work specifically for our videoconferencing system, and that was it. The Internet in the rest of the office was better, but the ISDN was part of a legacy Polycom system that worked just fine and was reliable as hell, so it lingered on through the 2000s.
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Nov 9, 2022 09:42
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barbecue at the folks posted:Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. Yeah I budgeted for one of the two lines being permanently connected, to the tune of $250 a month, and bonded if I needed 64Kbps more oomph for an mp3 or something. The relief when I upgraded to 1mbit SDSL for half the price and could run a permanent FTP server 😋
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Nov 9, 2022 10:05
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barbecue at the folks posted:Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. We had it for a short time also around 98-99 I think. It didn't take long before ADSL and cable became affordable and available and we got one of those instead, I forget which we had. I think we only had ISDN for a year max.
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Nov 9, 2022 10:08
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barbecue at the folks posted:Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. Then I moved to a one-bedroom apartment closer to campus with a shared T-1 connection and truly that was the year I most felt like I lived in the future
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Nov 9, 2022 10:39
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This video where vswitchzero did some benchmarking on the Pentium Overdrive, 486s, and the AMD 5x86 and Cyrix 5x86 was pretty neat. The first PC I built was a P100, and while I ended up with some older stuff being disposed of by a company I was working for later, I just wasn't the target market for a drop in upgrade for a 486 motherboard. In his previous video (the first one I watched on his channel) he got the overdrive chip he's using in this one that was sold as broken with some bent pins and no heatsink or fan and fixed it up and got it running full speed with a big heatsink and noctua fan (plus adding a resistor to the pads on top so it thinks there's a fan on all of the time, tach signals weren't a thing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQOmSKERPd0
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Nov 9, 2022 10:50
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ISDN was great apart from the fact that windows 98 decided my TELES ISDN card was a network card and bound the microsoft file sharing server to that interface by default. And clueless computer kid me had inadvertently shared C:\ with no password to the entire world because it was convenient not to have to deal with usernames and passwords on your home computers. Thankfully you just got hacked by your IRC buddies back then that hosed with your autoexec.bat instead of encrypting all your files and emptying your bank accounts.
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Nov 9, 2022 11:03
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Heh, remember that "virus" text file that just asked you to manually delete the hard drive? TEXTFILES.COM remembers. an old favourite posted:ACHTUNG!
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Nov 9, 2022 11:37
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barbecue at the folks posted:Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. Yeah me and my boss and some others had ISDN purely for the 'speed' and bandwidth overhead on sending out realtime PayTV smartcard data that was intercepted by one of us with a REAL subscription and distributed to slave/clones.
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Nov 9, 2022 13:12
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I got a job working on a helpdesk when I was 16, and the entire office of 150 or so people ran on a shared T1. It felt otherworldly fast at the time And it was really never saturated unless IT was downloading a huge file for whatever reason.
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Nov 9, 2022 13:47
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Qwijib0 posted:now there's a name I have not thought about in a long while. I always thought the eye was creepy Back before I had actual internet, I used Juno. Dial up to that 800 number, grab my email, disconnect, then dial in to the local BBS, hell yeah. flavor.flv posted:
mod in a speaker that plays this whenever the screen is on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7lLHJ6yfH0 Rev. Bleech_ has a new favorite as of 15:54 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 15:51
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barbecue at the folks posted:Anyone else had ISDN? When we had it installed (around 1999, I think?) they had to put in an extra phone line, so I had blazing fast 128k internet and a private phone number. poo poo was baller. And obsolete in a couple of years when suddenly cheap DSL was a thing. Yeah, I had it from 98 to 2000-ish. I couldn't get cable or DSL out where I lived at the time. Mostly wanted it for the lower ping for playing games online. I was living at home and had 2 jobs, so I had a fair amount of disposable income then.
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Nov 9, 2022 16:02
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I've only interacted with ISDN once, when the local clinic heard that 15 year old me was Good With Computers and asked me to fix their Windows Server machine's ISDN connection. I had never seen either before but I got it working. They offered me some acne treatment samples as thanks, which taught me far more about IT than the actual technical work did. (yes, I did take and use the samples, I was a 15 year old boy...)
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Nov 9, 2022 16:07
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You got more out of computer touching then I ever did. "No, no, nooooo, I said click the button.... On the screen. The monitor. The TV thing! "
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Nov 9, 2022 16:14
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ISDN was big in the broadcast TV/radio business. The way ISDN works meant that once it was connected you got the full 64K or 128K guaranteed, and fixed latency, which worked well for the fixed-rate codecs used for streaming from remote sites. Regular modems might claim 56K, but they'd usually connect at anything from 20-40K depending on random factors and latency would be all over the place
Sweevo has a new favorite as of 17:57 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 16:14
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The Norwegian national telco pushed ISDN for everyone back in 90s, so that's what we got for our first internet connection. We used it a fair bit, so it was nice to have separate lines for phone and Internet- and I could sneak in some hours of using both lines if I wanted to download something. Not cheap, though - but IIRC it was just a fixed extra cost per month over plain phone, and about the same cost/minute for the calls?
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Nov 9, 2022 16:31
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ISDN was great for online gaming as well. I remember getting like 40-50ms ping in Counter-Strike where DSL would be 90+
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Nov 9, 2022 16:33
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I heard mp3 was initially developed to make use of ISDN for broadcast but have been unable to verify. Supposedly that's why they aimed for "CD quality" at 128kbps.
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Nov 9, 2022 16:58
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Has anyone mentioned the Future Sound Of London ISDN broadcasts yet? They even did an album called ISDN. They used to broadcast live from their studio, in retrospect they probably made a mix and then hit play and sent it over ISDN but it was still very cool for the time.
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Nov 9, 2022 17:17
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In that vein, for a hot second KEXP had a full bandwidth uncompressed PCM audio livestream at ~1.5 megabits. Hearing my favorite band live, while driving down the highway, full bandwidth, was one of those vivid "living in the future" moments.
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Nov 9, 2022 18:48
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I was so excited to learn my high school was getting a T1 connection. Then I learned it was a fractional T1, which was a thing apparently. And then I discovered every teacher in the school acted like they were getting their own personal T1 connection, and hammered the network like the fist of an angry god to download their... their... whatever in the gently caress a middle school English teacher or so decided was the new hotness or somesuch. (e. in retrospect, by "fractional", we probably were supplied with 128k or something, just enough that a bunch of classes browsing the late 90s internet could saturate it, let alone me in my early days of piracy) So I would use the dialup instead to download Quake mods for the woodshop deathmatches. It turned out to be a lot faster. rndmnmbr has a new favorite as of 18:54 on Nov 9, 2022 |
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Nov 9, 2022 18:51
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Aix posted:ISDN was great for online gaming as well. I remember getting like 40-50ms ping in Counter-Strike where DSL would be 90+ Now I remember, we got ISDN because I wanted to play Quake and then Counterstrike well. (Downloading MP3s and south park episodes in realmedia format came soon after, this was well before SP was shown in Finland.) The connection was really stable and low latency at a time when most people were still on 56k modems, so for a short while I got to enjoy being a LPB and pwning the n00bz like I was real l33t.
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Nov 9, 2022 20:18
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Rexxed posted:This video where vswitchzero did some benchmarking on the Pentium Overdrive, 486s, and the AMD 5x86 and Cyrix 5x86 was pretty neat. The first PC I built was a P100, and while I ended up with some older stuff being disposed of by a company I was working for later, I just wasn't the target market for a drop in upgrade for a 486 motherboard. In his previous video (the first one I watched on his channel) he got the overdrive chip he's using in this one that was sold as broken with some bent pins and no heatsink or fan and fixed it up and got it running full speed with a big heatsink and noctua fan (plus adding a resistor to the pads on top so it thinks there's a fan on all of the time, tach signals weren't a thing). I always loved the giant warning on the K5: 
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Nov 9, 2022 21:13
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When I first got DSL it was 256k/256k, but for gaming it was fantastic. I was a holy terror in online games, partly because my connection was so much better than everyone on dial-up. Tribes was the game that made me pull the trigger, if I remember rightly. I used to get accused of cheating in America's Army, but that was mostly because I had a poo poo-ton of practice and had a good, stable connection that was more than fast enough in those days. I think by the time I left that house it was up to 756k/512k, but my memory is a little vague. It's weird that now I have 600m/24m cable Internet - it's just orders of magnitude faster.
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Nov 10, 2022 09:53
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If I wanted a faster internet connection now I'd need to upgrade my entire wired network past 1Gbit - or use the wifi, which is now somehow faster than the cables when the wind is right and the moon in opposition to venus. Which all feels very wrong.
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Nov 10, 2022 09:58
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Last time I had a physical DSL connection at my home was in 2012. After that I've just shared my mobile connection through a hotspot. Around here we have no data caps so first it was first just cheaper than getting a DSL connection (I was a student) and now I no longer see any sense in getting another connection when I already have more bandwidth in my 5G than I need. Living in the future is crazy.
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Nov 10, 2022 13:25
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CaptainSarcastic posted:It's weird that now I have 600m/24m cable Internet - it's just orders of magnitude faster. Even crazier that they’re still trying to prevent anyone from having real upstream numbers. I’m with AT&T so have gigabit both ways and can increase this to 5gbit, but Xfinity - the only real competition in the area - still do gigabit/24mbit. Like, I’m never going to change over given they charge pretty much the same amount.
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Nov 10, 2022 16:05
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It's cool that Comcast has completely rebranded to Xfinity and left their lovely old toxic name behind but still engage in the same lovely business practices.
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Nov 10, 2022 16:14
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I still have a 'LPB' T-shirt with a picture of an RJ-45 jack on it.
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Nov 10, 2022 16:51
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I still have a 'LPB' T-shirt with a picture of an RJ-45 jack on it. Also to recontribute to old-school broadband chat, I remember staring with literally open-mouthed shock watching my... KaZaA? song downloads going at what seemed like lightspeed, only taking like a MINUTE or EVEN LESS to download a track. Literally yesterday I was annoyed how long Steam was taking to download something and I checked to see it was "only" going at 250 mbps, or a speed fast enough to download, like, what, 600 MP3s a minute instead of 1? Ugh, so slow
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Nov 10, 2022 19:40
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Xfinity just doubled my speed out of the blue. Which probably means that fiber is in probably coming into the city soonish.
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Nov 10, 2022 19:43
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 Casimir Radon posted:Xfinity just doubled my speed out of the blue. Which probably means that fiber is in probably coming into the city soonish. we got the highest speed cable they have and it was really good for a bit, then I checked recently and I'm back down to what we had before...I should have switched to fiber when they were having deals.
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Nov 10, 2022 20:40
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I’m at the point now where my ISP could be offering me faster service if I paid more but I already automatically download most of my Linux isos in a few minutes in the middle of the night so what am I even gonna do with all that extra bandwidth? Teenage me would be so loving mad that I wasn’t doing it just to flex with my speedtest.net results 
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Nov 10, 2022 20:45
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EL BROMANCE posted:Even crazier that they’re still trying to prevent anyone from having real upstream numbers. I’m with AT&T so have gigabit both ways and can increase this to 5gbit, but Xfinity - the only real competition in the area - still do gigabit/24mbit. Like, I’m never going to change over given they charge pretty much the same amount. It doesn't really bother me - at least my upstream doubled in the last year. It rarely comes into play for me, aside from being faster on those rare occasions I'm uploading pictures or, even more rarely, video. In most of my town if you want actual broadband you're stuck with Xfinity, but the service has been good for me and getting a little better year over year. Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:It's cool that Comcast has completely rebranded to Xfinity and left their lovely old toxic name behind but still engage in the same lovely business practices. It's a completely half-assed rebrand, still. Most people I know still refer to them as Comcast, and it still shows up on their site and paperwork in different places. I suspect they were trying to pivot to calling consumer stuff Xfinity and business stuff Comcast, but they just hopelessly muddied things and I swear when most people refer to "Xfinity" it's with a bit of a sneer in their voice. I know that's the case for me.
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Nov 10, 2022 21:00
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History Comes Inside! posted:I’m at the point now where my ISP could be offering me faster service if I paid more but I already automatically download most of my Linux isos in a few minutes in the middle of the night so what am I even gonna do with all that extra bandwidth? I felt the same way till they took it away from me lol! I think I was getting 20MB down now I'm back to 10MB down, for more money. It's weird, and I just realized it was happening last week so not sure what I'm gonna do.
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Nov 10, 2022 21:03
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CaptainSarcastic posted:It's a completely half-assed rebrand, still. Most people I know still refer to them as Comcast, and it still shows up on their site and paperwork in different places. I suspect they were trying to pivot to calling consumer stuff Xfinity and business stuff Comcast, but they just hopelessly muddied things and I swear when most people refer to "Xfinity" it's with a bit of a sneer in their voice. I know that's the case for me. FWIW, I only ever used them when they were branded as Xfinity hence that's the word I used. I found their phone customer service to be loving appalling, but the in store was always excellent and beats the poo poo out of AT&T in store experience. The cable TV side of tech is pretty decent (again, way better than AT&T) and I never had any major issues with the service working as it should. But in a world where I'm paying $60 for uncapped gigabit, they need to up their game where I am.
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Nov 10, 2022 22:09
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EL BROMANCE posted:FWIW, I only ever used them when they were branded as Xfinity hence that's the word I used. I found their phone customer service to be loving appalling, but the in store was always excellent and beats the poo poo out of AT&T in store experience. The cable TV side of tech is pretty decent (again, way better than AT&T) and I never had any major issues with the service working as it should. Yeah, for various reasons there are a lot of practical monopolies when it comes to broadband in the US, and absolute deserts of connectivity in others. If you're lucky enough to be near downtown here you can get decent service through Centurylink, but outside that small area your choices are Xfinity, something ridiculous like 6mbps DSL, or relying on cellular service. I have only had Xfinity Internet service, no TV or phone or other poo poo, and in general my experience with them has improved over the years, but I also studiously avoid having to talk to them unless I absolutely have to. I own my own modem, and used to work for an ISP doing tech support, so I'm largely self-contained.
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Nov 10, 2022 22:19
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Internet is probably the only industry where I have actually ever filled out a "contact me for more information when we come to your area!" page and I have never once actually been contacted with more information
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Nov 10, 2022 23:18
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Nov 11, 2022 02:32
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I had the Mario one.
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Nov 11, 2022 03:01
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