More stories about stacks of modems

The journey from "whatever works" to "this needs to scale" described here is very, very recognizable.

In the early days of the internet, this is what pretty much every ISP looked like. The author doesn't seem to like their USR ISDN solution very much, but it was pretty much the best you could get at the time.

I forget the brand of the kit that actually caught fire, but that was definitely something that was happening for real in the data closets of the period. My employer at the time was using Cisco 5500s, which had to be upgraded to 5600s (or was it 5700s?) pretty quickly, due to the potato-like qualities of the CPU and RAM on the former model, and the rapid increase in modem speeds.

Good times? Maybe... We've definitely come a long way since the start of the century, and despite all the hand-wringing around "tech stagnation", turning up a 10Gb/s link these days is definitely more enjoyable than getting a T1 or E2 link to do its thing at the time...

This brings me back. In the late '90's, I interned at Sun Microsystems with the team responsible for the ISDN infrastructure that enabled people to work from home. My job was to automate modem SW upgrades for modems in racks in data centers and for remote users. The latter group was more challenging to serve since the upgrade could only run when they were connected and and "breaking" something killed their internet connection - it happened a couple times :(