Linux-friendly PCI dialup modem?

[Evan Leibovitch]

Colin McGregor wrote:

>As for modems, I paid $499 for a 9,600 bps modem (OUCH!!! but it seemed like a good deal at the time...). 
>  
>
Well, when that's all there was...

I had one of the original Telebit Trailblazers (dark grey case,  just 
like the one in the photo at 
http://www.tonh.net/museum/telebittrailblazer.html ). I was able to get 
it for the _discounted_ price of $1K because the 386 it was attached to 
was a known UUCP/Usenet  mail/news forwarder. That box served a bunch of 
sites and was for quite a long time the southern Ontario gateway for the 
entire biz.* hierarchy. Once a night (at 11pm, once the long distance 
rates went down) it would call Chicago and exchange all sorts of stuff, 
which would then get unpacked, forwarded and expired by the hours-long 
run of Cnews. I think my site and Drew's "lethe" must have between us 
sometimes served the half of the city that didn't get fed by UofT. But 
you could do that with Trailiblazers. :-)

(By comparison, the USRobotics HSTs that all the BBS and FIDOnet kiddies 
were playing with at the time were mere toys that couldn't do half the 
bandwidth.)

Sometimes, when one reads about the net-neutrality garbage and the way 
email is spammed and snooped, it's easy to get nostalgic for the days 
when you could trust the others on the UUCP network as a simple and 
straightforward place to get your mail, FAQs, porn and flamewars.

"You send 'mail' to people by typing at a computer? What a stupid idea, 
it'll never catch on..."

Evan Leibovitch
{uunet!utzoo|ihnp4!attcan}!telly!evan

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