i just ftp'd into a public ftp server running in Ecuador, and discovered an absolutely critical piece of US Robotics ISP modem pool software that has been missing for 20 years

thank you from the bottom of my heart, rolando felix of Educational Unit 10 De Agosto, for leaving your departmental computer ftp wide open ❤️ you just preserved some insanely useful and important dial-up ISP history. (don't worry rolando - i didn't peek too deeply into your ms-dos games and music folders)

the story:
in the mid-90s i was a teenager who had a summer job at a dial-up isp. we had 32 incoming lines which were handled by 32 external USR Courier modems, which were fed into a super chonky Livingston Portmaster terminal server. all of the support hardware took up an entire rack - just to let 32 people call in for internet service at 28.8kbaud. it ate a ton of power, and made a lot of heat.

then, in 95-96, US Robotics delivered two insane appliances: the Total Control Modem Pool. these were *tiny* devices that offered 16 dial-up modems at 33.6kbaud. if you paid a bit more, you could buy the NetServer version, which gave you a terminal server too. an entire isp in a box the size of a network switch.

the modems had buggy firmware. so USR offered firmware updates via their ftp site. you could even upgrade some of the modems to "x2" 56k service with a firmware patch. they supported it for years, and when 3com bought USR, they kept the ftp site running for years. and then, 3com shut down their ftp site. and no one thought to mirror it.

after 3 hours of searching, i was able to track down a single filename thanks to WBM: mpv90an.zip. not a single site on the web had it - not even IA or discmaster. on a hunch, i plugged it into the Napalm FTP Indexer (https://www.searchftps.net) and... unbelievably, there it was, sitting on an ancient box in someone's university office in Quito, Ecuador.

the most amazing part was how slow the server was. at 250 ms pings, it was like digging through a public ftp on a 14.4k modem in 1994.

tomorrow i'll be uploading these files to IA. for now, sleep.

#digiPres #softwarePreservation #ISP