Autumn Mahoney 
From my archives... this is what the command center of a mid-1990s dialup ISP looked like.
Later iterations would be more advanced, but this is how it started. A natural progression and leap of faith from the multi-line BBS it replaced.
Ian Scott 
🐙@autumn stacks of USR Couriers 😍
@polpo I know... it was beautiful turning off the overhead lights and sitting in the center of that room, with the flickering of the lights on each of the hundreds of modems around me speaking to one person's adventure out on the wider Internet.
Spike 
Futuristic Robert [KJ5ELX] 
Clifton RoystonThis is making me so nostalgic for the first days of our little ISP. Looks very different and yet the same. Even the fans blowing onto the shelves of modems to keep them cooler! We had put ours on metal rack shelving in the middle of the room so the air could circulate more freely.
Are the 3 chassis on the desk the terminal servers for the modems? I can't make out the logo or brand, and I no longer remember what we were using at this stage.
amd@autumn How oversubscribed was each phone line?
Busy signals were rare even at my small town, rural ISP and I’ve long wondered how many lines they had for their userbase.
@amd There were two kinds of oversubscription to watch out for:
1) The ratio between customers and number of phone lines. This is where you'd get busy signals if too many people tried to be online at once.
2) The ratio between the theoretical max bandwidth demand of all the modems, and the size of the upstream pipes to the Internet. Get this wrong, and everybody starts getting slower-than-modem-speed throughput.
I can't remember exact numbers for either of those, but it was something we monitored and watched closely. Lots and lots of graphs. Usually we could keep well ahead of both, but it took some careful anticipation, given how long it took for the phone company to get new circuits installed.
Delta WyeWe used to do log analysis to track the daily "high-water mark" for each pool of modems, and plan based on its dynamic ratio to our user count, so at peak usage there should be just a few lines free.
We figured out early on that if people never got busies calling in, they'd hang up when not using it. If they got busy signals more than very rarely, they'd start camping on the lines to avoid it, causing a vicious circle, so this "overprovisioning" actually reduced usage.
While I'm reminiscing, we also - very rarely - ran a waitlist for new users when we had trouble getting lines installed, which unexpectedly had the opposite effect than we'd expected.
It was the "Studio 54" effect - if a long line of people are waiting to be let in, you assume it must be good! The local word of mouth became "LavaNet is so obsessed with service quality they put users on a waitlist rather than get busy signals", and we suddenly got a ton of new signups.
James Blanding
Brett Sheffield (he/him)@autumn Wow. That is a thing of beauty! So much neater than the one I started at!
Jason Bowen 🇺🇦@autumn Now that's some advanced cooling!
ouinne
Gorgeous na Shock!@autumn The missing link between an HP 3000 sitting in a carpeted office with work desks and potted plants nearby, and the modern datacenter. 😌
@indigoparadox My dad worked with a bunch of Burroughs minicomputers, so I definitely get that. This all seemed like magic compared to those days.
lorddimwit is now @rk@well.comBeautiful photo, if anything because of the memories it recalls.
I worked in a room very much like that in 1998, before we got the Ascends working.
Koree A. Smith 
@autumn the ISP I helped run in the 1990s looked very similar to this.
Bryan@autumn what!!? This is wild. I discovered BBS AFTER the internet, but I miss it sometimes.
Cool XenuGood ole Livingston portmasters!!!
Moqume@autumn oh, the memories of my Sysop years!
#FreePalestine #HandsOffCuba
Rockwell Schrock@autumn Can confirm, our servers had a window A/C unit cranking 24/7 and a floor fan. Whenever an issue was detected, a speaker blasted an audio clip of “Captain Spock, damage report.”
brad@autumn@tech.lgbt my local Austin ISP, inetport, looked just like that in the mid 90s. One big beige box was my colocated P90 Slackware server that I let them use for some hosting duties in exchange for my own 28.8k line. I wish I had pictures from those days.
atomicangel@atomicangel@infosec.exchange @autumn@tech.lgbt Nah, just a big ol nerd with access to a lot of different hardware -- I worked in a PC store in 94-95 -- and a lot of patience
@atomicangel @blog Oh the winmodems were the bane of our support crew. Sold a lot of Sportsters to replace them with.
vga256@autumn ooooooo we had those exact livingston portmaster 3e's! our setup was very, very similar at the isp i worked at when i was a kid.
gotta love the fan cooling off all those couriers 😅
@vga256 I'm glad I got some photos to remember that time by. It's so neat that so many other folks are chiming in with memories of similar setups from back then. :)
smartwatermelon 
@smartwatermelon @autumn i think about it all the time to this day :D I was lucky to be 15/16 and around all this futuristic tech for a couple of summers
@vga256 @smartwatermelon Yeah... the extent to which a bunch of teenagers were tasked with figuring this all out was just wild. I love that this wasn't an isolated experience.
Jay Baker (they/he)@autumn Their biggest fan present in the shot. (Sorry...)
Les Orchard@autumn Working in a space almost just like this was my 1st paying job out of college 😁 It was, indeed, a multi-line BBS that had progressed to small 1990s ISP
@lmorchard I love how many people have responded that this looks so familiar! We were all blazing new trails in parallel back then.
SaraMG 🏳️🌈 
@autumn The repurposing of mail slots for modem trays is 🤌
Ursidinoj/The Bjornsdottirs
Belghast@autumn I worked at one, can verify. It was my college gig. Main difference... imagine all of that nonsense in the backroom of a trailer in a trailer park >.>
Dan Lyke@autumn I did have to go check the Livingston logo to make sure I was seeing what I thought I remembered from back in the day...
Peter Sanchez@bitprophet @autumn Wow this brings back memories. I remember had about 200 modems racked at the ISP I used to work at in the 90's. Honestly one of the best jobs I ever had.
Michael Cook@autumn I recognize the USRobotics Courier modems!
kira :3@autumn the fan is my favorite part
MrWainscotting@autumn We briefly ran one of those out of the room above the office in our town, because the recently-privatised telco wouldn't invest in expanding. Had 16 ports; 16 people in the region could be online at the same time. Which we were very proud of because it was double what the city had.
toxtethogrady@autumn The fan was a nice touch...
Grant 
🇨🇦@autumn
Oh how I wish I had pictures of the community dialup system I set up around that time! The power bar tandeming was outrageous. Shelves full of 56k modems, aggregated through a long forgotten device connected to a (gasp!) 56k telco data line.
The excitement when we eventually upgraded to a full T1 was unimaginable.
seismo!allegra!utzoo@autumn yup. Been there, done that.
Caryn has moved@autumn That equipment really brings back memories. And the fan was essential. 😀
Dale W. Carder@autumn are those Livingston Portmasters?!!!
Hans Hansen 🏳️🌈
James Helferty
wookie@autumn @Cdespinosa are those USRobotics?
@wookie @Cdespinosa Indeed. USR Couriers.