Anybody else have one of these back in the day?

Posted by Divergent5623@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 39 comments

My family used one of these dual 56K modems from Diamond for a short while before broadband become available in our area. I remember we had only recently upgraded from 33.6K to 56K. We already had a second phone line so that when someone was on the Internet someone else could still use the phone. With this bad boy, we used both phone lines and the Internet was flying! I was downloading QuickTime video clips like they were going out of style.

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Equivalent_Knee_Bone@reddit

Yes!!! And growing up in rural Ohio it was an epic game changer!

I could download an mp3 in 15-20 minutes!!!

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Divergent5623@reddit (OP)

To play on WinAmp!

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Equivalent_Knee_Bone@reddit

Absolutely with the graphic equalizer set to the wavy one!

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Phunistle@reddit

Cool! I had no idea this ever existed back in the day.

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icon4fat@reddit

And I thought my US robotics 56k v.90 modem was something special…

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Ryokurin@reddit

You could do Multi Link with USR modems too, Diamond just trademarked it under Shot Gun, but your ISP also had to support it. Unless you were with a national provider, most ISPs didn't even consider it. Hell the ISP I had back in '97/'98 didn't even have enough phone lines to support normal customers for several months.

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Inode1@reddit

Tried multi-link with some USR modems back when I was interning at my local ISP and taking password reset calls for free service... Lots of fun but real performance was rarely as good as they claimed. We when moved locations we setup 6 USR external modems to attempt a 6x bond to see if we could get 336kbs over copper but we where never able to keep more than 4 of them connected during the test, and I'm surprised we even got that to work. Cable/dsl was hitting the market at the same time along with some cool 802.11A wireless gear I ended up with for a couple years. Neat time to experience all of the different attempts to stave off real broadband.

I guess some guys managed 12x last year: https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/enthusiasts-bond-twelve-56k-dial-up-modems-together-to-set-dial-up-broadband-records-a-dozen-screeching-boxes-achieve-record-668-kbps-download-speeds

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TheThiefMaster@reddit

Lots of fun but real performance was rarely as good as they claimed.

Doesn't surprise me. Dual phone lines to a house are often dual pairs in a single cable and crosstalk pretty badly, rather than two independent cables.

IIRC our speed dropped from 33k to 28.8k when we got the 2nd line activated for voice.

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MWink64@reddit

When my father had an ISDN line installed, the phone company ran a cable that could support something like 7 lines. IIRC, they seemed to imply that that was the norm.

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Inode1@reddit

I work with a ton of analog gear still, it's almost always in multiples of 6 once you get past 4 lines, it's typically 6/12/24/48/100/250. All with twisted pairs following a color chart to keep everything sorted out.

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MWink64@reddit

You're right, I think it was 6. However, there wasn't really a need to go past 4.

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Inode1@reddit

Yeah definitely not for residential service, if you're going past 4 lines at home you either had a business at home or far too many teenage kids lol

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Inode1@reddit

The line run up to the house would have all been twisted pairs to prevent crosstalk, but past that you're at the mercy of whoever installed the wiring, most often they ran everything in serial with terrible splices. We did this properly installed cabling and still had underperforming connections compare to what they claimed. A lot of it came down to the infrastructure at the telco switch being old in our area

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myztry@reddit

Dual WAN modems were fairly common near their end.

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casillero@reddit

Shittt that's the brand I had. Diamond was pretty popular too but I had a US robotics baby

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clamdomain@reddit

Sportster 14400 FTW

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Cross_22@reddit

We had ISDN: Two B-channels at 64kbps each (if you feel like paying twice as much).

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MWink64@reddit

It still amazes me how my father went to the trouble of getting ISDN, only to use it single-channel.

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Enough-Fondant-4232@reddit

I preferred external modems back in the day.

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bhiga@reddit

I had the external version of this, it's still somewhere in a box... For a while I was using it on a FAX server.

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fivetriplezero@reddit

Whoa, look at Mr. Moneybags over here.

Never had one, but wanted one for sure. I think by the time we could afford one, DSL had arrived.

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AnonymooseRedditor@reddit

Yeah and that jump from 56k to 1Mbps was amazing

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Mobile_Analysis2132@reddit

300 - 1200 - 2400 - 9600 - 14.4 - 28.8 - 1Mb - 50 Mb - 400 Mb

Lived on the 1Mb for over 10 years.

If I want even faster, plugging into the 1Gb uplink at our data center that is connected via multiple 40Gb and 100Gb uplinks.

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fivetriplezero@reddit

256kbps was our first. But my god, the real advantage was freeing up the phone line.

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AnonymooseRedditor@reddit

For sure! No more getting yelled at by parents to get off the phone.

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bobbrumby@reddit

Growing up we had a 56k modem in the sense that the makers name was 56k but its speed was infact 28.8 Kbps, felt so gipt as a kid that they could do this when I realised.

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Cybrknight@reddit

Cheap mans ISDN.

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sharpied79@reddit

Check out the Serial Port on YouTube.

Those guys push multilink PPP with a "few" modems 🤣

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jacle2210@reddit

Yup, I had one of these as well, it was pretty cool; unfortunately I don't remember what kind of speeds I was getting.

Eventually, having to pay for two phone lines was getting to be too much, so I canceled the 2nd line and went back to "normal" dialup; but like everyone else, they eventually brought DSL to our little hick town, so I was able to give away this cool bit of technology.

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dblock1887@reddit

This was cool and great but cable internet was already out by that time so I never got one

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bappat@reddit

Yeah, I had one. How it would momentarily hang up one line for an incoming call was pretty neat. My first regular modem was a 9,600 baud model but as each iteration of modem would double the speed I’d upgrade. I owned an ISP in my small home town and standardized on V90 (vs US Robotics). Eventually I sold the company when DSL was just becoming the standard, when a large investment in equipment to be housed at the RBOC was required.

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