I don’t go there more than once a week anymore because there isn’t a good mobile app. I previously doomscrolled Reddit for a couple of hours each day. It’s been great for me!
Ah, a fellow frequent flyer, I see? I don't really have a horse in this race, but Microsoft turning Azure credits into Skymiles would really be something. I wonder if they can do that, or if the credits are just credits, which presumably can be used for something with an SLA. All that said, if Microsoft wants to screw with them, they sure can, and the last 30 years have proven they're pretty good at that.
I don't think the value of credits can be changed per tenant or customer that easily.
I've actually had a discussion with Microsoft on this subject as they were offering us an EA with a certain license subscription at $X.00 for Y,000 calls per month. When we asked if they couldn't just make the Azure resource that does the exact same thing match that price point in consumption rates in our tenant they said unfortunately no.
I just chalked this up to MSFT sales tactics, but I was told candidly by some others that worked on that Azure resource that they were getting 0 enterprise adoption of it because Microsoft couldn't adjust (specific?) consumption rates to match what they could offer on EA licensing.
Non-profits suffer the same fate where they get credits but have to pay rack rate with no discounts. As a result, running a simple WordPress website uses most of the credits.
I was doing dialup internet support when these things hit the market. What a fucking mess. It’s 25 years later and I still get anxious when the phone rings, because my brain thinks it might be a senior citizen who can’t connect after they got a good deal on a new computer. Sometimes we could get them back on line with an init string, but often they needed new drivers. Walking someone through either of those over the phone was brutal.
Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever take for granted!
Took maaaaaaany hours to for tech support to figure out why my $$$ 33.6k external modem worked sloooooooow. Often took them a lot of convincing that it was actually slow, a lot of early internet users had higher expectations, but I was coming from 2400bps service. Bazillions of failed packets reported in Windows Dial Up Networking.
Finally found the person that figured it out. Computer only had an 8250 UART for the serial port. $35 ISA serial port card with 16550A UART solved it!
This was definitely when tech support could still be fun. We didn't have tiers or scripts or anything, just a handful of people on shift answering calls. You kind of loved when you got one like this when the customer calling in also had a good attitude about it. Probably because you knew the call was going to eat up at least a quarter of your shift, and you got to think a little. It sure beat the 10th time that day you were walking someone through uninstalling and reinstalling TCP/IP on Win95/98/ME.
All these years later I really do still have anxiety when the phone rings, though. I have an irrational fear of picking up even when it's, like, my dad, or picking up the phone and having to call a business to ask a question or something.
Do you happen to remember what sort of system you had that still had an 8250 but extended into the >14.4kbps era? Was this just a super old machine in the mid 1990's, or something in the 486+ range and the motherboard manufacturer had a lot of late 80's chip stock?
I suspect they enjoyed talking to me because I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body).
It was a no-name 486 DX2 66MHz from "Consumer's Distributing" (defunct soviet-style Canadian retailer), and a cheap model at that. 8250 was probably a cost-cutting measure they felt like they could get away with.
Most people probably bought internal modems so these UART issues wouldn't pop up. But we had bad experiences with IRQ conflicts locking up the mouse on a previous computer. Not an issue with Lynx/Pine/etc, but we wanted GUI and Netscape, so we were trying to avoid that. Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).
It was a lot of calls, so I dutifully reinstalled the drivers and tried a lot of dialer strings.
> Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).
Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM pair.
It was probably unusual for this ISP to deal with a bargain basement computer, but a premium external modem, and the incompatibilities that can result.
> I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body)
You probably sounded like a generic adult woman at that age. Much younger, and your physical size keeps you from having the same resonance as an adult; much older, and your voice has started cracking.
But when I was 11 or 12, I could order pizza delivery, and they would always close with "Thanks for your order, Mrs. Devilbunny". Never got shunted off to the "I need to speak with an adult in the home to place this order" line.
It was kinda neat, although I never really thought of ways I could exploit it. (I wasn't devious enough at the time.) And then when I got devious enough, I had to wait two or three more years until the cracking stopped completely and I could be believed as an adult again.
All these years later I really do still have anxiety
when the phone rings, though. I have an irrational
fear of picking up even when it's, like, my dad,
I feel you. Near the end of my mom's life there were a few years where I was on basically 24/7 phone alert in case she was rushed to the hospital again, etc. I was never really able to use vibrating alerts again after that. I just associate them with that stressful time.
For different but similar reasons I get anxiety spikes from Slack notification noises. Can't handle 'em.
I also briefly worked in Student IT support junior year of my university and "Winmodem" sent similar chills down my spine. An idea that never should have happened!
You can boil a lot of tech changes down to either A: Let's take this problem that has been solved in hardware and move it to software! and B: Let's take this problem that has been implemented in software and bake it into hardware.
Somehow, A is always a train wreck, and B usually pushes the abstraction stack upward and moves the industry forward. Yet, we as an industry keep trying A and expecting good results.
Yeah, in the case of winmodems/softmodems, it was because A is cheaper. Or, at least, you could externalize the costs.
In our case, we technically did not support your hardware - you had to show up with a working modem. But in practice, if you want to retain your customers, you need to support their hardware. At one point we used to have CDs full of known good drivers for all of the common softmodems that we'd send out if we couldn't figure out a configuration workaround. Even then, I had a handful of discussions with folks where I basically told them that their thing wasn't going to work - they either needed a different modem, of which we'd recommend a few that we knew some stores carried, or they needed to find a way to cut down their line noise. I'm one of those types that takes it a little bit personally when I spend a bunch of time on something and still can't solve it, so that always sucked. Maybe you could say that wasn't strictly the modem's fault, but even the cheapest hardware modems had better tolerance for line noise.
I think a lot of the problem was how difficult it was for the average computer user to tell the difference between a real modem and a Winmodem. Some manufacturers deliberately failed to distinguish them in marketing, pretending they were both "modems". Retailers were in on the scam, too. The whole puddle got muddied to the point where a savvy consumer needed to keep a whitelist of "real modem" make and model numbers with them going to the store. You could usually tell by the price, though, as you say they were cheap (garbage).
This is unlocking memories for me. I think we used to tell folks something like "If it's under $50 and Walmart sells it, that's a winmodem" or something like that.
In theory, one of the selling points was that as standards changed, you would just upgrade your drivers/software and not buy a new modem. That probably made a lot of sense if you bought a USR Winmodem, but those $20 unbranded models were lucky to ever see an update. If you were lucky, you had a reference model and could use the OEM drivers which did occasionally get updated. But by the time these things came about, V.90/V.92 existed, and dialup standards were kind of frozen in that 56k-if-you-were-lucky state. There wasn't anything to upgrade to - you got DSL if you wanted more bandwidth over POTS lines, or you went to cable.
Also I could be completely full of shit on the above. These are memories from 16-18 year old me.
I was also doing dialup internet support around that time. Talking a senior citizen through setting up a dial up networking connection on Windows 95/98 using a winmodem on a line which was obviously noisy with no way to see what was on their screen was pretty common.
I remember one time I'd gotten the connection established and they said "now what?", and I said "You've connected to the Internet" and they said "so what do I do now?" They'd gone out and bought the internet package because it was the thing to do, but had no idea what to do with it. I ended up showing them how to go to Google which had only just been released that month.
And I definitely relate to being adverse to hearing a ringing phone
That is an amazing story. And you know that because of you, that person probably still calls their browser “the internet” because you showed them how to get to google.
I can’t imagine any old person calling tech support now and getting that kind of help. But think about how many people got their very first exposure to the internet just before you hung up the phone. Crazy.
I was thankfully out of the ISP business before the Winmodems hit. But the many... agonising... hours... spent doing support sometimes with the same person to get people online is something I'll never forget. We had someone who'd call back every few weeks because he had "optimized" (broken beyond belief) his winsock configuration in new and inventive ways that makes me think he was most likely doing it on purpose for social contact.
Every time it'd take an hour or more, because you'd tell him to do X, ask him to confirm he'd done X, ask him if he was sure he'd done X, then have him try to go online, and he'd call back and it'd turn out he'd done Y because he "thought it'd work better".
Also, the sheer number of times people who'd get too trigger-happy and start trying to connect before they'd hung up...
I was around for the gold master of AOL 5.0 (Kilimanjaro). After the release we were pulled into a conference room to get on a call with Steve Case. You don't want to get on a call with the CEO immediately after a launch. It turns out our execs were installing 5.0 and then... couldn't get online. It hung with the modem init. As the person in charge of the QA lab I pulled all of our test run data. Couldn't duplicate on any of the dozens of machines. Sr. devs were running debuggers. Didn't see anything on their machines. We went into the office of our highest-level exec and borrowed his laptop.
Winmodem. Dev hooked up a debugger and found the issue. There was a bug in the soft modem driver. Hot fix was released, but it was too late for the pressed CDs. Luckily it was an edge case on high-end laptops. That were issued to all of our execs with the buggy driver.
I worked at a non-AOL ISP as tech support back in the day and still have the occasional flashback to having to talk folks through uninstalling the custom TCP/IP stack the “Try AOL” CDs would install.
Click on start. Yeah that’s in the bottom left. Yup that one. Then look for settings. No the word settings. Has a little arrow next to it. Yeah hit that. It didn’t do anything? Wait, click with the mouse button on the left. Yeah it brought up a little menu to the right? That’s good. Now look for… ok let’s start over and remember not to click anywhere besides where I tell you to. And keep the mouse where it is. Ok find the start button again. No its in the bottom left of your screen…
Same here. With call forwarding our 24/7 support usually rang at my house. Night was the 'drunk shift' and usually login problems. One user was particularly edgy about his password and would not say it even to me, they were stored as crypts, so I could reset it. He said he had pasted it from another place (which probably means he forgot it and was too arrogant to admit it) Round and round until I checked the logs and he was trying to sign on with a pw of '********' which is how it had gone into the clipboard. Instead of engaging with him further I set his pw to that. Problem solved.
My greatest win was to add a few lines to our RADIUS server to flip case one time on bad logins, so if 'mYpASSWORD123' failed it would try 'MyPassword123' and let them in if it worked. Logs showed thousands of fixed logins per month and reduced tech support calls to less than a third. We declared victory over CAPSLOCK.
I have a collection of retro stuff from my childhood - an XT, a 386DX-40, Pentium-133, a bunch of hard drives, motherboards, video and sound cards, and so on... I really love all this retro stuff. But one night on eBay I've stumbled upon the modem I've had - the MultiTech 28.8k. I didn't buy it.
I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as:
You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad.
So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.
I built an app for myself that I’ve been considering rolling out as a product. It’s built around SMS because I will always look at a text message but app notifications are constant and easy to ignore. But the whole idea of the product is built around not being able to ignore the thing the app tracks for you. So far in a limited release the only thing I’ve learned is that my free tier needs to be quite limited and that it’s going to cost a few bucks per month per user to run it, so I need to charge more than that. But you’re effectively paying to be texted about something specific. It’s not because you don’t want to opt into push notifications - it’s because you’re literally paying for something to cut through the noise. Im not OP but if they’ve got something similar going on, that’s a good reason to use SMS.
That said your concern is incredibly valid and it’s why SMS needs to remain somewhat expensive. Could you imagine if SMS was as cheap as email? Holy shit the spam volume.
When you say "ignore" do you mean a) you see it, read it, then delete/ignore it; b) you see it, see you don't recognize, and delete/ignore without reading; or, c) you never see it because of app/OS settings filtering it?
I am pretty solidly in camp A, I will read every text message that hits my phone but if it's spam or something like that I will just get pissed off and remember not to give that company/person any money ever. But I still read it.
