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The Internet Archive is invaluable when working with old hardware or software when you need to go look at old version of a website to find manuals, drivers, or general info. Unfortunately a great number of files lived on FTP servers because the web wasn’t really up to hosting them in the 1990s, and many of the web crawlers did not archive the contents of FTP servers. I frequently run into cases where an archive URL will link to a ftp:// URL to a long defunct FTP server and that’s usually a dead end. This usually leads to a lot of very crafty Google searches to try to find the filename that was linked. Mayyyybe there was somebody else out there that mirrored all or part of the FTP site and their index is discoverable on the web.

Sometimes the FTP server is gone, but the present day web servers still have the files somewhere. This is the case for US Robotics I’ve found when I need to look at old Courier or I-modem drivers and firmware that were only on ftp.usr.com, with a little fishing the old files are still there on the support.usr.com website.  (If somebody from USR is reading this, please please don’t delete these in the sake of preservation, even better make them more discoverable somehow).

For example, a copy the Courier ISDN Modem file library index and descriptions can be found on archive.org at: https://web.archive.org/web/20001002222652/http://consumer.3com.com/courieri/filelibrary/index.html

Links to say, the Courier I-Modem internal firmware links to this ftp://consumerftp.3com.com url which was not archived.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001002222652/ftp://consumerftp.3com.com/usr/dl14/ie020104.zip

Or the V.90 flash ROM code for the Courier V.Everything 25 MHz:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000823182315/ftp://consumerftp.3com.com/usr/dl05/usrxmd25.zip

However note the usr/dl14 and usr/dl05 part of the URL. These file areas are still available on the support.usr.com website today:

https://support.usr.com/support/usr/dl05/usrxmd25.zip

Take the old file area path such as usr/dl05, and append it to https://support.usr.com/support/.  The majority of the time you’ll be able to get the old file. There’s no index that I’m aware of that shows all the files available, so you’ll need to find the download area directory name and filename from some other method such as archive.org or old file listings.

I figured this out recently when spending a bunch of time combing over the old and new support websites for manuals. Neat, huh?

Also shout out to Logitech for still running an FTP server at ftp.logitech.com. Want drivers for your old 1996 Quickcam eyeball camera? They’re there!

Cisco VIC-2BRI-NT/TE and VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE nested inside carriers

TL;DR: I complain about my failings and show off pictures and log files. Later some gradual understanding of ISDN and why this probably won’t work with my particular version of the Courier I-modem with a U interface.

In my telcom fiddlings to get a 56k dial-up modem to work I explored an Adtran Atlas 550 as an ISDN switch along with a USR Courier I-modem, which worked great. The original project however is still stalled out, and that is using a Cisco router with a VIC-2BRI-NT/TE or VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE card and “isdn protocol-emulate network” to provide network-side BRI service to the Courier I-modem as a cheaper alternative to an Atlas or other ISDN hardware.

The Atlas configuration at least validated the I-modem actually worked and would terminate a V.90 56k dial-up call.

Also I am barely literate in ISDN, I only have a scant understanding of U, NT, TE, NT1, S/T. I need a flowchart, I could be trying to put square pegs in round holes.

According to this Cisco TechNote “Configuring Network Side ISDN BRI Voice Interface Cards“, the VIC-2BRI card comes a NT version that sounds like it should act as a network interface. I wanted to see if I could bring up a BRI between a Cisco 26xx and the I-modem, configure a voice-peer, and send a “voice” (dial-up modem) call over it from a VoIP endpoint. I don’t know if this is really possible, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying. I have seen other people mention this configuration but I don’t think I’ve seen any that have succeeded, or if they have they are short on the details.

The problem first of all was finding one of the damn VIC BRI cards that supported network mode. These seem to have been only used in Europe and were released in the 2000s. When I was looking last year the only places on eBay I could find selling them for a decent price were in the UK, Turkey, and Greece, so they took weeks to arrive. There are many VIC-2BRI-S/T cards out there, but they’re not what we want.

VIC-2BRI-NT/TE and VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE – how could they possibly be confused, also the S/T markings

There is also the confusing product numbers: “VIC-2BRI-NT/TE” and the newer “VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE”. This is important because each one has different requirements for the NM voice carriers, which in turn affects which Cisco router chassis it works in. It doesn’t help that some people transpose the 2 as a non-existent “VIC2-BRI” instead of “VIC-2BRI” which further confused the parts search. I’m pretty sure I did this myself a few times.

I mis-read the support docs no less than three times thinking I had ordered everything for a configuration to test out in an old Cisco 2600 I had (used for my ISP!), and realized I got an VIC2 that only worked in a 2600XM. Then I thought I bought a NM that worked in a 2600XM and it only worked in a regular 2600. Then after careful searching on eBay I thought I was buying a VIC2-2BRI, the photograph very clearly showed a VIC2, and a old VIC-2BRI showed up weeks later!

The VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE is supported on NM-HD-1V, NM-HD-2V, and NM-HD-2VE, where as the VIC-2BRI-S/T-TE and VIC-2BRI-NT/TE are currently supported on NM-1V/2V.

 

Months later after ordering all the right parts finally, I wound up with two full hardware configurations: a Cisco 2600 + NM-2V + VIC-2BRI-NT, and a Cisco 2600XM + NM-HD-2V + VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE.

Courier I-modem configuration

The back of the I-modem has a port labeled “U”, which according to the manual has an integrated NT-1.

Model 1 – U-Interface

Cisco 2600 XM configuration

In my latest test, this is what I had configured on the 2600XM for the VIC2-2BRI-NT/TE:

!
interface BRI1/0
 no ip address
 isdn switch-type basic-ni
 isdn timer T309 30000
 isdn protocol-emulate network
 isdn point-to-point-setup
 isdn layer1-emulate network
 isdn incoming-voice voice
 isdn supp-service name calling
 isdn skipsend-idverify
 line-power
!

I had to use National ISDN type for the emulation. The 2BRI cards only supports certain ISDN switch types in network-emulate mode:

vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type ?
  basic-1tr6    1TR6 switch type for Germany
  basic-5ess    Lucent 5ESS switch type for the U.S.
  basic-dms100  Northern Telecom DMS-100 switch type for the U.S.
  basic-net3    NET3 switch type for UK, Europe, Asia and Australia
  basic-ni      National ISDN switch type for the U.S.
  basic-qsig    QSIG switch type
  basic-ts013   TS013 switch type for Australia (obsolete)
  ntt           NTT switch type for Japan
  vn3           VN3 and VN4 switch types for France

The Cisco is lies when it says it supports 5ESS and DMS100 emulation:

vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type basic-5ess
Interface must be shutdown before configuring switchtype
vintage-gw5(config-if)#shut

vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type basic-5ess
%ISDN 8, Network side supported only for primary-5ess, primary-4ess, primary-dms100, primary-net5, primary-ni, primary-qsig, basic-net3, basic-qsig, primary-ntt.
protocol-emulate network should be removed

vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type basic-dms100
%ISDN 8, Network side supported only for primary-5ess, primary-4ess, primary-dms100, primary-net5, primary-ni, primary-qsig, basic-net3, basic-qsig, primary-ntt.
protocol-emulate network should be removed
vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type basic-ni
vintage-gw5(config-if)#
vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type primary-5ess
                                        ^
% Invalid input detected at '^' marker.

vintage-gw5(config-if)#isdn switch-type primary-dms100
                                        ^
% Invalid input detected at '^' marker.

vintage-gw5(config-if)#

and the Courier I-modem only supports these switch types:

*W=n      ISDN Switch Protocol Type
            n=0 AT&T 5ESS Custom
            n=1 Northern Telecom DMS-100
            n=2 US National ISDN-1
            n=3 US National ISDN-2

Leaving me with only National to even attempt.

My understanding from the “Configuring Network Side ISDN” document was that I would need to wire up a BRI crossover cable to run between the Cisco 2600 and the I-modem. When I did that, I got no sort of response from the Cisco nor the I-modem. However when I wired up just a plain straight-through cable, I could see all sorts of activity on “debug isdn events” whenever I rebooted the I-modem or issued an ATZ! to soft reset it. The I-modem shows the physical link as “Inactive”.

The debug log on the Cisco would say this:

May 16 17:39:39.398: ISDN BR1/0 EVENT: service_queue_from_physical_layer: Recvd L1 prim ISDN_PH_ACT_IND state is IF_DOWN
May 16 17:39:39.398: ISDN BR1/0 EVENT: isdn_sw_cstate: State = 4, Old State = 0
May 16 17:39:39.450: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface BRI1/0, changed state to up
May 16 17:39:40.836: BRI1/0: !!!CHECK CLOCK SOURCE!!! and the interface is disabled due to Lost framing count of 41 in the past 12 msec.
May 16 17:39:40.844: ISDN BR1/0 EVENT: service_queue_from_physical_layer: Recvd L1 prim ISDN_PH_DEACT_IND state is IF_ACTIVE
May 16 17:39:40.844: ISDN BR1/0 EVENT: isdn_sw_cstate: State = 0, Old State = 4
May 16 17:39:40.848: ISDN BR1/0 Q931: L3_ShutDown: Shutting down ISDN Layer 3
May 16 17:39:40.896: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface BRI1/0, changed state to down

which sounds like I need to provide clock from the Cisco side, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to enable it:

vintage-gw5(config)#network-clock-select ?
  <1-2>  priority

vintage-gw5(config)#
vintage-gw5(config)#network-clock-participate wic 0
 WIC slot is empty or does not support clock participate
vintage-gw5(config)#

This is as far as I’ve got. I haven’t messed with it anymore, I don’t know if I need to re-visit a BRI crossover cable, go dust off the 2600 with the older VIC-2BRI card and play with it, or if there’s other config options I’m missing. Or do I need an S/T I-modem, which I’ve never ever seen?

Or the Cisco VIC provides an NT the same as the I-modem provides an NT, so this means I’m trying to connect two NT back to back, and still need something to provide a U.

Of particular note I’m running a 12.4 ADVENTERPRISE image on the 2600XM for some X.25 work, which is way newer than the 12.2(15)ZJ and 12.3(4)T listed in Platform Support matrix in “Understanding ISDN BRI Voice Interface Cards“. The fact my VICs still show up in “show diag” and can still be configured leads me to believe there’s still support for the cards in 12.4, but who knows if Cisco only supports exactly 12.3(4)T.

GPT 4o gave me some dubious hallucinated commands on the I-modem that didn’t exist, and suggested removing “network-emulate” from the Cisco which kind of defeats the whole point. It also suggested the VIC provides clocking internally and there isn’t an option to enable/disable it, which might be true.

12 AM later:

If I’m understanding things correctly:

The I-modem has an integrated NT-1 and it expects to be using a U interface to an LT at a telco CO. It finally dawned on me to think of the “U” to really mean “U cable” instead of something at the CO acting as a “U interface”. This U cable speaks 2B1Q.

I-modem -> U (2B1Q coding) -> Line Termination (LT)

The Cisco VIC[2]-2BRI-NT/TE can also act as an NT and thus also expects to be using a U interface to connect to an LT.

Cisco NT mode -> U -> LT

The “U-interface” is an RJ-45/8P8C connector, but only pins 4-5 in the center carry a signal and polarity doesn’t matter, thus a crossover does nothing here. And in fact if trying to use an BRI S crossover cable, the two pins of the U are definitely not connected to anything. The U can provide -48 VDC power on pins 7 and 8.

I was getting confused when I kept seeing things say “U is two wire/conductor” when my I-modem very much has a RJ-45 out the back and came with an 8 conductor cable.

“S” is also a RJ-45/8p8c connector, but it actually has TX/RX pairs. Here a BRI crossover cable can be used to connect two somethings together.

Thing -> S (AMI coding / I.430) -> NT1 -> U (2B1Q coding) -> LT

The Adtran Atlas 550 Quad BRI card I have in my understanding of the data sheet is operating in LT mode, which lets things expecting U interfaces, such as the I-modem to connect to it.

In conclusion it sounds like my Courier I-modem that wants a U interface won’t work with the VIC. However, if I had a European model that uses S/T it might? Or if I had something to replace the Cisco that would emulate a LT interface.

Documentation followed

Replaced LH1056 solid state relay

TL;DR: replaced LH1056 solid state relay / optocoupler at U3

One of the USR Courier HST modems I purchased recently had a peculiar problem that if I plugged the phone line into the “wall” jack of the modem it returned NO DIALTONE when I tried to dial something, yet I was able to dial something if I plugged it into the “phone” jack. After a while I realized from looking at the ATA that when plugged into the “phone” jack it was immediately taking the line off-hook, even if the power was turned off!

This sounded like a relay was stuck open or something was commanding a relay open somewhere so I went hunting for it. I had no idea what a relay looked like on a PCB so I hooked a multimeter to one of the phone line terminals and went poking around the board around the phone jacks to see what was connected to it. This eventually lead me to a pair of chips labeled LH1056, which the datasheet told me was a solid state relay. The datasheet told me pins 1 and 2, 4 and 6 were connected so I checked these on the board. On one I noticed between 4 and 6 I had nothing, but on the other between 4 and 6 I had continuity. The datasheet said these were normally open relays, so that sounded like my culprit.

LH1056 were apparently long obsolete, I didn’t put any effort into trying to find a replacement and just ordered a few off eBay. They finally arrived today so I got to desoldering the old relay and putting on a new one. Just like that, problem solved!  The modem now dialed, taking the line off-hook and on-hook as expected.

Now I have enough spare relays to fix several more modems, so if you encounter this problem I guess hit me up!

LH1056 spares

Replacement 24 V DC power supply for I-modem

TL;DR: Original US Robotics I-modem power adapter is extremely rare. I cut mine open to document it. Original adapter provides 20 V AC (1500 mA capacity) across pins 3-4 of mini-DIN connector, no other voltages. Substituting a $15 24 V DC power adapter seems to work just fine.

The US Robotics Courier I-Modem seems to be a unique beast in that it’s a combination ISDN terminal adapter and has a built in V.34 (upgradable to x2/V.90) modem.

Aside from normal 64K/128K data ISDN BRI service, the other unique and import part is the all digital connection which allows the modem to terminate a legit 56k modem connection, which requires one direction to be PCM. Using my Adtran Atlas 550 as an ISDN switch along with its analog FXS ports, I can connect a v.90 modem to an FXS port, the Courier I-modem to a BRI interface, and make a real V.90 call across it! I regularly get 53,333 BPS and the occasional 54,666 BPS.

The problem is the I-modems are rare and the power adapters for them are even more rare because people always split them up. They take a 6-pin mini-DIN power plug and there’s no reference online that I could find as to what kind of power they require, until now. It was hard enough even finding a silly photograph of the AC adapter with a visible part number to even get started. I got very lucky and found a pair of modems and one had the A/C power adapter. The transformer I have is made by Ault Inc, T57201500C010G, output 20 V AC, 1500 mA, US Robotics part number (P/N) 1.015.1229B. This is quite a beefy transformer, 3″ long and weighs a pound or two.

I found a couple of dubious looking places such as poweradapter dot co and uspoweradapter dot com that listed the USR part number, but when I inquired or tried to place an order for “in stock” it turned out none of them really had one in stock.  Ault T57201500C020G and P/N 1.015.1317 was another similar USR power adapter I found on parts lists that may also be an later generation or alternative model. I really wish I could find an old Ault catalog to explain their part numbers!

Original US Robotics Courier I-modem power adapter with mini-DIN plug

6-pin male mini DIN power plug

At first it was not clear to me if the factory power adapter only provided 20 volts AC, or if it also provided other voltages on the pins.

On the main board of the modem, there’s a group of four diodes right behind the power switch, which tells me it probably takes A/C and rectifies to DC for the components.

Power input of I-modem

 

Cutting open the transformer housing revealed a few things:

Courier I-modem power adapter inside

Inside is an isolation transformer and a small PCB with a fuse and diode (marked with 1.5 or 15?) connected to the secondary windings. There are four wires in the cable going to the DIN plug, red, white, green, black. Green is connected to the frame of the transformer, black is connected to earth ground, and these are only connected to the outer metal shell of the DIN plug, they’re not connected to any of the pins inside. White is connected to a “3” on the PCB and also to pin #3 on the DIN plug, and red is connected to a “4” on the PCB and also to pin #4 on the DIN plug. These do not have continuity to the other side of the transformer.

Mini DIN-6 pinout

Somebody suggested to me that the diode may be acting as a rectifier to provide only a half-cycle waveform as sort of a cheap way to get DC-ish power. I thought maybe this was why the power transformer was so hard to find, this weird half-wave output thing. But also does this mean I could just feed DC power into the modem?

I wanted to see the waveform of the power output before I got too deep into trying to find or craft an exact replacement. Being a new oscilloscope user I had read all the warnings about connecting probes to an AC transformer and AC mains and put it off for a while. Finally after careful probing with a multimeter I was pretty sure I could hook things up safely so gave it a shot, connecting my probe to pins #3 and #4 on the DIN connector:

Power supply output

I was expecting to see some sort of flat rippled half-cycle thing, but no, there’s a full normal AC waveform there, peaking out around 32 V and 22 V RMS. So the AC adapter really is outputting normal AC power.

Running a photo of the transformer through ChatGPT suggested the diode and fuse inside the transformer housing were wired across hot/neutral as a form of circuit protection. Through some other legit-looking math, it suggested 24 – 27 V DC could be an acceptable substitute, which sounded right to me.

It was suggested today on the The Serial Port Discord that this could be a transient-voltage-suppression diode to protect the modem from over-voltage.

I wanted to see if the thing would run on 24 VDC, so I ordered a power adapter to try it out. I’m pretty sure the thing will run on another plain 20 V AC power adapter, but ones with AC output are slightly harder to find and/or require some buck adapters to get the right voltage (such as a 24 V AC Nest/Ring doorbell transformer). There are other US Robotics 20 V AC-AC adapters but their rated capacities top out around 500 mA, not enough for the I-modem.

Powering up

The new DIN-6 plugs I received from Amazon had square-ish pins so they didn’t fit, so I just chopped off some short wires to shove in the modem power socket in the meantime. I hit the switch and it all came to life!

DC adapter to “outermost” pins 3-4

Responding to AT commands was a good start, I started testing through various ATI commands and all seemed to be working:

ATI4 commands with new power adapter

ATI12 ISDN status

It had already brought up ISDN with my Adtran Atlas, didn’t seem to have any issues there.

I tested writing to NVRAM by writing AT&B1&W, resetting the modem with ATZ, and then verified it was there, then did a AT*P2 to change one of the ISDN numbers, issued an ATZ! to reset it and verified the new value came back. I’ve seen this sort of thing fail, writing configuration to NVRAM, on other devices when they were fed with DC when they were expecting AC voltage.

Pro tip: when configuring ISDN it’s really nice that on the ATI12 screen they list all the *-commands to change the different settings so you don’t have to go digging for the manual.

Next was to bring up a modem call to see if that worked, and it did!  Connected to it at 53,333 BPS using V.90.

USRSTATS on V.90 connection

I downloaded a couple of megabyte sized files across it, and it all seemed to work.

I tested this 24 V DC power adapter on both Courier I-modems I have and both seem to work as expected. I’ll continue to test with it, but so far it seems a DC adapter will work.

24 V DC adapter with new mini-DIN plug

V.90 call made across Adtran Atlas 550

Model notes

I’ve pointed this out on my modem teardown collection and I’ll call it out here too. There are at least two different external revisions of the US Robotics Courier I-modem:

Version 1: US Robotics Courier I-modem with ISDN/V.34

One is the “Courier I-modem with ISDN/V.34“. FCC ID CJE-0313, P/N 1.020.195-B. The one I have has a green/gold PCB with board P/N 1.012.0313-E, copyright 1995. It has an Intel i386 EX, a TI DSP, and a Sipex SP503CF IC chip handling RS/EIA-232 and V.35 serial comms.

The bottom of the unit has 12 DIP switches for controlling AT commands, boot settings, and whether or not it speaks V.35 or EIA-232 on the serial port.

ATI3 reports “US Robotics Courier I-modem with ISDN/V.34”. ATI7 reports 20.16 MHz processor, 768k EPROM, 256k RAM.

Leaky cap warning: the 1995 board had two 47 uF / 63 V electrolytic capacitors, C92 and C140, that had started to leak onto the PCB. There was some minor trace corrosion around C92 that I had to re-tin, other caps looked ok. C140 in particular was difficult to remove because it was in the middle of a huge ground plane, so this is why I didn’t bother recapping the whole board. If you get one I recommend opening it open to take a look at all the capacitors.

 

Version 2: US Robotics Courier I-modem ISDN with V.Everything

The other is the “Courier I-modem ISDN with V.Everything“. Also FCC ID CJE-0313, P/N 1.020.0396-00, model number 0698-1. This one is more of what I call a green/dark green PCB/mask with board P/N 1.012.0511-B, copyright 1997. It still has the Intel i386 EX, but it’s not clear if the TI DSP is still there or was replaced with another chip. There’s a metal can on one chip that I haven’t lifted up to see what it’s hiding. Instead of the Sipex for serial, it has more traditional MC1488D AND MC1489AD line drivers. Presumably because it only supports EIA-232 and not V.35.

The bottom of the unit only has 4 DIP switches for controlling the AT command set and boot settings.

ATI3 still reports “USRobotics Courier I-modem with ISDN/V.34“, ATI7 20.12 MHz processor, 768k EPROM, 256k RAM. This one is upgraded to x2/V.90, ATI7 reports HST,V32bis,Terbo,V.FC,V34+,x2,V90 with a supervisor rev of 2.7.6 and DSP rev 3.0.4.

I haven’t tried but I’m assuming the boards are probably functionally identical and they can both be upgraded to V.90.

Edit: 5/5: I was able to update my first gen “with ISDN/V.34” to 2.7.6 firmware and it now supports x2 and V.90.

Replacement power for 14.4k HST

After proving my HST worked in my previous post with an ATX power supply, I went looking for triple-output power adapters (5 VDC, 12 VDC, -12 VDC). I finally found something that works, an ELPAC WM113TT AC-DC power adapter along with a new female DIN 5 connector.

 

There were a few power supply ideas on eBay, the first I found was the Mean Well RT-65B for about $21-$27. This would have worked, but it’s only in a metal cage with exposed contacts so I’d need to get a case for it. It’s also well over powered on the 5 and 12 volt outputs at 5 A and 2.8 A, respectively.

Then I started searching around on Digikey under “AC DC Desktop Wall Power Adapters”, and found matches under output “5 VDC, 12 VDC, -12 VDC” with DIN 5 connectors. Maybe I’d get lucky and USR used an COTS product. Here’s where I found the WM113 series of power adapters from Inventus Power. They were all marked as obsolete, but figured they’d show up on eBay if they were. The DIN plug was the wrong gender, but I was ready to chop it off and solder on a new DIN connector if that’s what it took.

I ran across somebody selling ELPAC WM113TT power adapters for $15-$20, still had the triple output and a DIN 5 connector. I found a datasheet for the WM113 or the WM113TT with the DIN output pinout, what I was looking at had exactly the same voltages on the pins I needed (or so I remember) and thought this was almost perfect if there was a way to swap genders.

DIN 5 female-female coupler, wound up not using

On Amazon I found a DIN 5 female-female coupler, and thought this would be perfect if the power supply had the right pinout. I got these before I got the power supply, cut off part of the plastic and found it fit into the back of the Courier HST just fine.

However when I finally got the Elpac WM113TT, it did not work as I expected when I plugged it in.

Elpac WM113TT pinout

The pinout I had was completely different than the datasheet I had saw, so I had to put on a new DIN connector. Above on the right shows what I used on the new DIN female connector.

Completed power setup

Hooked it all up and it worked perfectly!  The WM113TT is basically a literal brick of a power supply. For only providing < 1 A on each of the outputs, the thing is nearly 5″ long and weighs a couple of pounds. At least the input and output cables are long so it can be placed out of the way.

I picked up a couple of “widebody” USR Courier HST modems and have been working through documenting power adapters for them and sorting out what goes with what. I figured out almost all Courier and HST models have different power supplies and voltage requirements. I’ve been tracking down manuals and cross-referencing the FCC IDs in the manuals vs what’s on the modem label to tell what goes with what.

USR was certainly fond of using DIN power connectors back then, different orientations, different sizes, and different voltages. This page will likely change over time as I figure out more.

[my HST 14400 pinout below]

US ROBOTICS HST

These seem to have come out in 1986-1987, one of the first “widebody” HST modems. These have what I’m referring to the “black/green manual (vtda.org)

  • “widebody”
  • FCC ID CJE794FAST, FCC REG CJE794-11323-DM-E
  • Modem chassis P/N 1.014.299 Rev B
  • S/N starts with 0061-xxxxxxxx
  • DIN 5-pin female power connector
  • Manual: “US Robotics Courier HST Modem  User’s Manual”
  • Power Adapter (from manual): Supply voltage: 115 VAC, 60 Hz, 16 VAC Output

I don’t have one of these so I don’t know the exact pinout of the DIN connector yet

COURIER HST (14.4k HST)

This is the pair I have, one appears to have come out in 1988 and the other in 1989. I have recently scanned this manual and calling it the “black/red manual (archive.org)

  • “widebody”, may have also been branded “COURIER HST dual standard” on the front?
  • Supports standard V.32 modulation, and 14.4k with HST
  • FCC ID: CJE794-0093, FCC REG CJE794-2748-MD-E
  • Modem chassis P/N 1.014.263 Rev B (1988 version), P/N 1.014.323 Rev A (1989 version)
  • DIN 5-pin male power connector, use MAK 50S
  • Manual: “US Robotics Courier High Speed Modems  User’s Manual” 1.015.282
  • Power Adapter (from manual): Supply voltage: 120 VAC RMS +/- 10%, 60 Hz, + 5 VDC @ 750 MA, +/- 12 VDC @ 200 MA

So this one is tri-voltage and not just AC in. I have worked out the pinout for this and will show below.

COURIER HST dual standard with V.32 bis and ASL (16.8k HST)

I believe this is the last “widebody” but not sure, or the manual covers both “widebody” and “narrowbody” models. Only seen one photo, don’t have FCC ID or anything else

  • maybe: “widebody”
  • maybe: natively support standard V.32 bis / 14.4k, and first to support 16.8k with HST
  • maybe FCC ID: CJE-0151-147, FCC REG CJEUSA-73130-FA-E
  • maybe Manual “US Robotics Courier High Speed Modems  User’s Manual” (1992) 1.015.544
  • Power Adapter info not listed in manual

COURIER HST Dual Standard with Fax and ASL (16.8k HST ?)

  • “narrowbody”, 1993
  • FCC ID: CJE-0151-234, FCC REG CJEUSA-73130-FA-E   (shares same registration as the widebody HST DS, but different FCC ID?)
  • Modem chassis P/N 1.014.425-C
  • Small DIN connector?

COURIER Dual Standard V.34 Fax with V.32 bis

This may still be HST capable but doesn’t carry HST branding anymore?

  • “narrowbody”
  • maybe FCC ID: CJE-0263, FCC REG CJEUSA-73130-FA-E
  • maybe P/N 1.020.091-B

My Courier HST power pinout

Courier HST 0093 and plug

For what I’m calling the “second generation” widebody, FCC ID CJE794-0093, model 0093, with 14.4k HST. I used the voltages from the manual and then probed the voltages at the 1488 and 1489 serial chips to work out what was what, seems to be right. TIL the pin numbering of a DIN connector is all over the place, it’s not in order.

[4/16: See this follow-up post where I find a more suitable AC-DC power adapter]

Hirschmann MAK 50 S, female DIN 41 524  / 930172-317 connector

  • Pin 1: GND
  • Pin 2: GND
  • Pin 3: 5 VDC
  • Pin 4: -12 VDC
  • Pin 5: 12 VDC

Power pinout notes

I didn’t have the factory power adapter nor something better that could provide 5 VDC, 12 VDC, and -12 VDC so I improvised from an ATX power supply using the 24-pin ATX and a drive molex connector to test.

Here blue is -12 VDC from the main ATX 24-pin connector; yellow is +12 VDC, red is +5 VDC, and black is ground from a drive Molex connector:

Molex to DIN 5 power adapter

Firing it up to test:

Testing my Courier HST with an ATX power supply

Success!

Getting firmware info from the Courier HST

Requisite action shot dialed up to the BBS:

Courier HST 14400 in action

BBS USRSTATS for the HST call

A collection of stories of evolution, follies, starting from scratch, and what not to do.

When I started my ISP back in the summer of 1996, how to bill customers and collect money from them was an afterthought. I started with nothing, not even a database, and not realizing what a vital chore it would become. There were some ISP billing programs out there, but they were often very expensive, rigid, or expected you to be a Windows NT shop. (I was a UNIX/Solaris shop.) Compared to providing customer technical support, the act of actually generating invoices and processing checks was equally as consuming of time. If I had a better story around payments the business may have been more profitable and lasted longer. It gives me a lot of appreciation for the problem of billing and payments, there’s a lot of considerations that have to go into it.

There were a few decisions early on that set the course of things to come:

Metered billing

I was one of the few ISPs that did metered billing instead of “unlimited” access. You subscribed to a base tier and for $/month you got so many hours online per month, and then paid so many cents/minute of overage after that. (E.g. 25 hours for $15.95/mo or 240 hours/mo for $25, 2 cents/minute overage.)  Unlimited access was the norm, where you paid a flat rate of $19-$30/month and use it however you wanted. The cardinal sin of a dial-up ISP is to not have enough available line capacity and return busy signals to customers. The idea that somebody could leave their computer on all day sitting there hitting the POP3 email server while not at home, occupying my limited phone lines and modems, was completely ludicrous to me. To me selling “unlimited” service felt shady and a legal liability because there were always buried terms and service to harass or fire the customer if they were online “too much” after just telling them “use it as much as you want”.

This model lead to two immediate problems, how to do recurring monthly billing along with usages, and how to process call accounting? The usage model ruled out using something like Quicken to send out simple invoices. A few ISPs I knew repurposed old pager billing software, as it had the notion of recurring billing and minute rates. I forget what I did in the very beginning, there was probably some perl script I got somewhere that processed RADIUS accounting and generated daily reports.

Checks, invoices, postal mail

Being a rural area and 1996, the standard way people paid was with a check or money order. You mail them a invoice, they mail you a check. Not many people had credit cards, or if they did they were very hesitant to use them for a monthly service. There was a fair amount of money orders coming in, people would take cash to the US Post Office, buy a money order and send it to us. The office door also had a mail slot, so people could also drop off cash or a check there too.

Billing date

Another big decision I had to make was “when” to bill the customer. Most companies billed at the first of the month. If you signed up for service in the middle of the month then they would generally pro-rate the bill and add it to next month’s bill. I realized right off the bat this meant doing a huge batch of work at the end of every month, and all the money would only come in during the middle of the month. It seemed like it would be better to spread out the work throughout the month and ensure money was constantly coming in. Plus I didn’t want to do this pro-rating every time somebody signed up. So, anniversary date billing it was. If you signed up on the 18th, then your service was due for payment on the 18th of every month, and I sent you an invoice two weeks ahead of that on the 4th.

But what happened if you signed up on the 29th-31st of the month? I just set your anniversary to the 1st of the next month.

I also billed ahead for service, because I needed the money now to operate. None of this business you use it for a month, I bill you afterwards for the month on net 30. I didn’t like the idea of people signing up, using the service all month, and never paying a cent. When you signed up your first month was due immediately. It also made service suspension tidy, if you didn’t pay your bill by the start of the new period (with a very brief grace period), your account didn’t work.

In reality this made for a lot of awkward conversations with customers, “yes you see you pay for next month’s service, but we’re also billing you for any overages from the last full month you had”. Some people had problems with my service dates, for instance going from Mar-4 to Apr-4 instead of Mar-4 to Apr-3. I don’t know if it was right but seems to have worked out.

Anniversary date: 18th
Invoice generated + mailed out   3/4
Calculated overages through      1/18-2/18  < Billed for January-February's overage
Due date, anniv date             3/18       < Billed for March-April's service

Excel as a billing system

Customer ledger

From the very beginning, I used Excel and a lot of copy-paste to send out bills. A worksheet would contain a generic form of the invoice to be mailed out, and then another worksheet contained all of the names and addresses of customers, previous balances and payments, arranged by billing date. Every day I would go through the sheet, basically do a hand mail merge of every customer copying their address from one sheet into the other, look up any usage overage, and print out their invoice. This took at an hour or two a day, and often dad would begrudgingly volunteer to do it for me in the evenings (thanks dad!). I forget how usage information got on there, if it was manually running a perl script on the database server to key in by hand, or if I somehow made a .CSV to load into Excel every day to copy from.

I actually found a floppy disk the other day that had a copy of this 16,000+ row .XLS file on it which prompted me to write this post. Excel usage lasted well into 1998, much longer than I thought it did!

Page to be printed and mailed

 

The first billing software I bought dedicated for the purpose was called BATS (Billing And Tracking System). This was a Unix-based program that was supposed to do it all, billing, RADIUS parsing, overage tracking, accounts receivable, the works. The problem was by the time I got all of my customer information typed into it, we had already blown past the user license and couldn’t add anymore users. The next license level was a huge jump from 75 to 5,000 users, and I couldn’t afford the upgrade. This was back when $1k was a lot of money, as I was still burning cash every month and not remotely profitable. I never did bill any customers with it, I seem to recall it had a lot of nits I didn’t like and/or I couldn’t get it integrated with my setup so I never scraped together the cash to upgrade.

I famously predicted that maybe after a few years I might have a couple hundred users on the service, but this thing took off like a rocket and I had over 100 customers within months. Blowing out the license count and doing things by hand in Excel wasn’t going to work at all. I didn’t what to do, but something had to be done.

Enter perl

I had never done any serious programming at this point, and had never used an SQL database. I dabbled in C but didn’t get it. I knew perl was popular with system administration so I gave it a try. One of the first big problems was processing the customer dial-up usage. I needed to not only put this into a database to do billing but also a way for customers to look up their own usage so they didn’t blow up their bills.

I literally went from print("hello world"); $a = 100; print("a is $a"); into learning to parse RADIUS accounting logs and INSERTing them into a MySQL database. (Back when mSQL vs MySQL was the MySQL vs Postgres of its time.) This made it way easier to look up somebody’s usage. I had a perl script that would parse the accounting logs every day and toss them into a table. Later on FreeRADIUS would do this.

This taught me about database indexing. My schema had no keys or indexes at all, so over time it got slower and slower to do lookups. One day I learned I could do an ALTER TABLE..ADD INDEX (username,time) to set the username and call time as indexes, and holy shit it was mind blowing how fast lookups got.

As I got more familiar with Perl and MySQL I got to the point where I was able to write a very rudimentary billing system and stop using Excel. There were a few tables with the customers’ names and addresses, their account type, and a ledger to keep track of their balance. Every morning billing.pl would run, look for who’s billing anniversary date was coming up, roll the service dates in the database out a month, calculate last month’s overage usage, write out a text invoice to a file, and then shoot that file to the printer with lp. Oddly doing date calculations and re-formatting date fields became the bane of my existence and had to go through a few Perl modules to find something that worked well.

For quite a while this system assumed a customer had one and only one dial-up account, everything was keyed on their username. I couldn’t bill for anything else without creating a new username. It felt like quite a bit of achievement to go back and refactor my code to basically add in another while loop to handle multiple services, but it all worked nicely and gave a lot of flexibility.

Part of this big change required assigning everyone an account number, then that account number would own all the usernames associated with it. I made a fatal flaw here and used the username’s unix UID number along with the account creation date to ensure uniqueness, in the form “uuuu-mmddyyyy“. The major problem was that this scheme leaked the number of subscribers I had, so one could extrapolate how fast I was growing over time if they knew several account numbers. I don’t know if anyone did that, but it was sure there in the open. At 13 characters it was also much longer than it needed to be, 5 digits would have been plenty to identify an account. I really wish I had hashed it to a shorter sequence of letters and numbers, as it was a lot to say over the phone and type in all the time. Toward the end the UID portion was also a sad reminder of how many thousands of dial-up accounts we had created over time and how many were left active.

There were still many invoicing edge cases to deal with by hand. For example if somebody upgraded or downgraded their account this involved manual SQL queries and/or manually editing a text file to send them a new invoice. There were often grandfathered accounts when I’d change around services and had to keep the old rates in code. Or if there was a bug, printer problem, missed day, it involved going into the script and manually setting some variables and running it again, praying it didn’t just nerf everyone’s service dates. I didn’t know about SQL transactions, and MySQL didn’t even have them yet!

Bills had a invoice number and a sequence letter starting with ‘A’ on them. If your sequence was ‘B’ or even ‘C’ that means some of the day’s invoices were manually re-printed due to a problem and to ensure we sent the right ones out.

De-coupling database operations from the print operations was a first big step to unravel the mess. One perl script would go through and roll forward all the service dates, generate pending ledgers, then other scripts would come along to generate invoices and run credit card payments. Several more rewrites would follow, billing.pl became billing2.pl, billing3.pl, get-bills.pl, cc_proc.pl, print-inv2.pl, and god knows what else. I learned to embrace use strict; in perl to prevent a lot of bugs.

There was no grand design here, there were no libraries, barely just a set of included common files. I didn’t have any experience with how billing “should” be done until I worked at other places. This was all learning on the go and doing what was necessary at the time. I copy pasta’d the same boilerplate Perl DBI to MySQL connection code in practically every single script because it was easier than refactoring it all. Source code management was making a tarball of the scripts and MySQL databases.

Perl-based invoice generation

Enter PHP

Around this same time I was starting to learn PHP too out of necessity. Coming off my experience with MySQL I was starting to use PHP to make it easier and possible for other employees to deal with customer data. There were some basic internal web forms backed by Perl CGI scripts to enter new signups, change addresses, enter payments, and see payment history, these were mostly re-written in PHP so the code was in one file per feature.

This became a whole dual codebase beast. Anything on the backend was written in perl and did the bulk of database manipulation, invoicing, and reports. All customer or employee-facing stuff was written in PHP. There was frequent re-implementation of functions in perl and PHP, and the code was littered with global variables. I briefly tried using Perl-Mason (embedded Perl in HTML), but PHP was just faster to write and ran faster.

The internal PHP tools website grew more and more features for employees to interact with. I implemented a rudimentary “issue tracker” which was just a glorified text form for each customer, to keep track of account notes and technical support issues. I had embarked on a complete v2.0 rewrite of all of this that I never finished, which wound up with us using some legacy PHP pages for some work and the new PHP pages for some other work. Like perl these were largely all one PHP/HTML page per function, e.g. add a user, modify a payment, update a credit card, customer search pages, add/cancel services, bad check processing, reports for collections, etc.

I still have all the code from this today and couldn’t tell you of the half dozen half-rewritten directories of code were the latest working versions.

Credit cards

I accepted credit card payments pretty early on, using the payment processor one of my upstream ISPs used. Again, a very manual process at first. When customers signed up at the bottom of the form was an area where they could write in their credit card number for automatic billing. The processing company provided a DOS-based settlement program that was a glorified handheld terminal. You keyed in the credit card number, the address, amount and hit send. This would dial out on a modem to submit the charge.

In the beginning there was a field on the Excel spreadsheet or database to note that this invoice was to be billed with credit card, not to mail it out. So every day or so I would take the stack that was set aside and key in the few credit card numbers and submit them.

Eventually I got to the point where I was storing credit card numbers in MySQL (this was long before PCI DSS and I could do this). I could then write CSV files with payment information, and then submit that batch over modem to the processor for settlement. If the credit card was declined, I wrote a note on the paper invoice and mailed it to you.

Way later we signed up with Authorize.net to do real-time and batch card settlements over the Internet. I recall something really bad happened with them, like they were late to deposit funds or we had a contract dispute, and this resulted in going to yet another payment service, Net1.

Checks, everyone hates checks

Checks were such a pain in the ass, I wish I was able to stop taking them or seriously discourage their use. They cost a lot of time and money to do. Not only did this involve printing invoices and mailing it to customers, it involved receiving them, keying the payments into the system and taking them to the bank. Because I was sending out bills every single day, this meant we received payments every single day and they had to be deposited. We were doing well over a thousand check deposits a month, and because of the janky date adjustment I did for people who signed up between the 28th-31st, this meant at the beginning of the month there would be a huge pile of checks to go through. I’m not joking, there would be literally a stack of checks 1.5″ thick to process at the beginning of every month.

Our bank did not like this one bit! It got so bad they warned me they were spending so much time on our big deposits they couldn’t close their books at the end of the day — either help them out or take our business elsewhere. It was a small town bank, they had no way to take any of this electronically or do ACH.

By now I already had an internal system for bulk check entry. There was a PHP web form where we could enter in a list of daily check payments to apply in bulk without moving off the keyboard or going to other screens (unless somebody didn’t have their account number). Based on this I was able to print a form with check info and total in chunks to send along to the bank with the deposit so they could go down the list and just check that we were right instead of doing the work themselves. Bank was somewhat happier.

Later I started dealing with a new business bank in Tulsa who offered electronic check deposits, but they did not have any kind of API. It turned out all they had was a web form to enter in the routing and account numbers and amount. I thought maybe I could scrape their deposit web page and do a POST request, but their HTML form wound up being a mess of input fields and I gave up.

I forget if I ever did get to a place where we could submit checks electronically or if we were still taking them to the bank up until the very end.

Faxed signup forms

I made deals with several businesses throughout the area to be local sign-up locations for us. Usually these were computer stores or some other business ran by a tech-savvy person. They got the foot traffic and often the $15 account setup fee, and provided the customer the computer setup instructions and/or our customized copy of Internet Explorer on a set of 3-5 3.5″ floppy disks. They would fax over the sign-up form to us and we’d enter it in the system. This piece of paper we had no problem handling because it meant a new customer and only took a minute to enter in.

I made the mistake of letting two businesses in the same city be signup locations and not really having an agreement about any sort of exclusivity. I caught hell when a customer signed up at business A, they were out of floppy disks, and they sent the customer over to business B to get disks. Business B wanted to know where their signup money was before they handed over disks, and the poor customer hated us all.

Interestingly in our whole existence I don’t think we ever had any sort of on-line signup process. You had to come in, call, or fax us to set up an account. There just wasn’t enough on-line people to make it worthwhile to write. We did have some people that would mail in signup forms! We almost always had to walk somebody through over the phone to set up their computer so might as well do it all in one call.

Paper billing

Every day at 11 AM (even weekends) the billing cron job would fire and invoices would start rolling off the printer. It would be somebody’s job to take the pile of paper, fold it, and stuff into envelopes. We tried a few different paper folding machines and they worked until they didn’t, mangling a lot of invoices which needed re-printing. I got to where I would just take 10-20 sheets at a time, fold them by running a metal bar across (my favorite was the backside of a carabiner) them to give a rough shape, then start stuffing them into windowed envelopes. For sealing them I’d hold a tape dispenser in one hand and just dab a 1″ strip of tape across the back flap of each one. For postage we had a postage meter for a while, but Pitney Bowes wanted a lot for the rental and it was annoying to constantly replenish the account. So I wound up buying coils of stamps and either using a stamper or going through the stack and putting them on hand. It could all be carefully organized and done in a mechanical manner by hand, but it had to be done every single damn day.

The post office didn’t like us either, with our volume they demanded we sort our outgoing mail into local and non-local ZIP codes to make their sort easier.

Late payments were always a problem as well as associating the payment with the right account. Nobody would write their usernames or account numbers on their checks, or somebody would write a personal check for a business account, names changed, etc. To help encourage people to send in their payment in a timely manner and figure out who is who, I started including a pre-printed return envelope, and going as far as to buying paper with a perforated bottom for a stub they could tear off and return. This worked pretty well, virtually everyone used them but it was yet an extra expense.

Once we were sitting around thinking “you know we haven’t done bills in a while, did you do them?” “No, not me”. I realized after a system migration the billing cronjob had been commented out and no bills had been generated for at least week! This took a bunch of careful editing of the billing script to step through each missing day and process that day’s invoices to get us caught up. To this day I still have dreams where I freak out that I haven’t done billing in a while.

If this all sounds labor intensive, crazy, and expensive, that’s because it was! It’s hard to say if we pushed back on customers for a credit card or charged a $1 a month for a paper invoice, how many would bail on us. Always a monumental “if” was if we went card/ACH only, could we reduce costs enough to lower prices to attract more customers to offset the ones that we would inevitably lose from the switch.

Homegrown Postscript invoices

Several years in (~2002) I realized Postscript was just text and if I just shot Postscript at the printer, it’d print. This lead me to switch from writing plain text invoices to using Postscript. This provided a much nicer looking bill, I could print logos and barcodes for the account numbers on them. The process was similar to writing text invoices and surprisingly simpler than I imagined. I used the PostScript::TextBlock and PostScript::Elements modules to generate strings to print on the page “canvas”. For example:

my($p_head1) = new PostScript::TextBlock;

$p_head1->addText(  text => "CWIS Internet Services\n", font => 'Helvetica-Bold', size => 10, leading => 10 );

$p_head1->addText(  text => "203 North Broadway\nStigler, OK 74462",
                  font => 'Helvetica',
                  size => 8,
                  leading => 10
                );
...
print BILL "%!PS-Adobe-3.0\n";
print BILL "%%Pages: (atend)\n";
print BILL $code39;
print BILL "%%Page: $pages $pages\n";
$code .= [$p_head1->Write(252, 144, 396, 755)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_msg2->Write(108, 12, 410, 710)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_msg3->Write(108, 12, 370, 692)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_msg4->Write(108, 12, 374, 680)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_msg5->Write(108, 12, 389, 668)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_msg6->Write(108, 12, 421, 656)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_custaddr->Write(230, 60, 72, 702)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_acctnum->Write(72,12,452,692)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_invnum->Write(72,12,452,680)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_invdate->Write(72,12,452,668)]->[0];
$code .= [$p_pagenum->Write(72,12,452,656)]->[0];

print BILL $code;
...

For each invoice line item that was processed, call some more library functions to add a row to the output, and then more function calls to write a footer. It could even do multiple pages. The barcode was just another font, the company logo was included from an .EPS file, and this was all written to a file on disk. Then all these pages were sent to the printer.

Generated Postscript invoice

Because I kept the Postscript and text files around, this provided a nice feature where customers could log into their account management page and see all of the exact invoices that had been sent to them in PDF format.

I had hoped with the barcode this would make processing payments easier somehow, just scan in the account number. In reality by the time you reached over, scanned the barcode, and came back to key in the payment amount, it was just quick to use the 10-key number pad to enter the info.

FreeRADIUS, MySQL, Self-service

I adopted FreeRADIUS fairly early on because I needed to write RADIUS accounting logs to a database for billing, which is what it was designed to do. As time went on the set of PHP and Perl scripts to keep track of users made it possible to add/change/remove RADIUS authentication information in MySQL. This let me do automated account suspensions for non-payment, your dial-up account wouldn’t work but you could still receive e-mails. When the switch was flipped the past due accounts were ruled with an iron fist and people did not like this at all! At least I could blame it on “the system automatically doing it” and not something “we” personally did to you.

We adopted Exim and Courier-IMAP as the e-mail subsystem because it could be backed by MySQL. The same story, the billing scripts could manipulate accounts here, set up new ones, and disable them as needed.

Eventually toward the end this all resulted in a customer self-service system. Customers could log into their account management web page and do things like add extra e-mail accounts, change credit card information, or make credit card payments to re-activate accounts. There was a modem connection information page that would look up what USR Total Control or Portmaster 3 you were connected to, query it via SNMP, and display the speed/protocol/error counters of your connection for troubleshooting. It all was pretty nice but took a long time to get there.

Specials and $9,999.99 bills

Around the same time of the Postscript rewrite, I added several other features to the billing programs. If you were a credit card customer, we’d automatically email you when your card was about to be billed, if it was about to expire, or if it was declined. We could send you e-mail invoices if you really wanted them. If you bounced a check, we mailed you and suspended your account. If you added new services to your account, this was written to a pending table to add to your next bill.

I had never imagined I’d need to code in the ability to do discounts or special sales. The few times we did some new subscriber specials it was a mess, because the billing script had to be manually altered to handle it. I forget what special we did, pay a quarter and get a month free or something, but it resulted in a bug that sent out invoices for $9,999.99. I would have thought a normal person would see this and think “oh that’s clearly a mistake”, but no, several people very much called us up and yelled at us for expecting them to pay $10k! Even if I caught the bills before they went out and scratched out the amount with a pen, people were still upset about it!

I thank god that Internet service was not subject to sales tax or other taxes like it was in Texas. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to implement tax code.

Fortunately when we started selling DSL service no extra tweaking to the billing system needed to happen, we could just drop in new product codes for service and DSL modems and go. Around this time I finally gave in to competition and started offering “unmetered” dial-up plans along with lower cost metered plans.

My all-time favorite customer interaction was somebody that came into the office and very loudly started arguing with me that their bill was wrong, because September was not the 9th month. I had to list out the months on the whiteboard before they finally relented. Good times.

When it came time to close the business and another company to acquire all the accounts, this all blew up in my face because, for example, I didn’t have a good way to list who had pre-paid service and how many dollars were involved. It took me and somebody from the other side working well into the wee hours of the morning of the last day pouring over the database and building custom reports to make sure the numbers were right before we closed.

1994 computer prices

Digging through some more files from my old backup tapes, I found some of the price lists I was giving out when I was building and selling computers. This also gives some idea of version numbers that were going around that time. I didn’t carry any inventory at all, these would have been bought at somewhere like Sam’s Club or some big retailer in Computer Shopper. I seem to recall doing about a $20-$60 markup on most software.

Procomm Plus 2.01 for DOS   $85        Procomm Plus for Windows  $120
QmodemPro for Windows       $89.95     

Corel DRAW! 5.0 for Windows   $599     Adobe Photoshop 2.5 for Windows $525
Broderbund Printshop Deluxe 1.2 for Windows   $69

Lotus Smart Suite 2.1 for Windows         $475  (1-2-3, AmiPro, Approach, Freelance Graphics, Organizer)
Microsoft Office Standard for Windows     $470  (Word 3.0, Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0, Mail)
Microsoft Office Professional for Windows $557  (standard + Access)

Artisoft LANtastic 6.0  1/5/1/25/100 user  $115/$399/$725/$1389/$2230
Novell Netware 3.12 5/10/50/250 user       $635/$1340/$1940/$2540/$3699
Novell NetWare 4.01 25/50 usr  $2899/$3799

OS/2 2.1 for Windows       $90        OS/2 2.1  $175   OS/2 2.1 Upgrade  $130
MS-DOS 6.22 Upgrade        $58        
Microsoft Windows 3.11    $125

Borland C++ 4.0  $350  Borland Turbo C++ 3.0  $88  Turbo Pascal 7.0 for DOS  $135
Microsoft MASM  "ask"
MS Visual Basic 3.0 Professional for Windows  $328, for DOS $335
MS Visual C++ 3.5 for Windows Standard  $99
MS Visual C++ for Windows NT            $385

A small office/home office (SOHO) system configuration looked like this:

486DX2-66, VESA Local Bus
8 MB RAM
15" 1280x1024 SVGA monitor
Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB 1 MB video card
1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drive
540 MB EIDE hard drive
2x speed EIDE CD-ROM drive
Full-tower case
EIDE VLB controller
US Robotics Sportster modem
MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11

for an easy $1989.95!

I was usually marking my PC builds up by $200 and still undercutting most retailers. However there was no way I could compete with software bundles found with most retail PCs, such as throwing in something like MS Office, Encarta, or other stuff, unless I blatantly bootlegged the software. Which, many small PC builders did. I discovered this to great effect when running the ISP and walking people through setting up dial-up networking and needing their Windows 95 floppies/CD. They didn’t get one with their computer which half the time left them in a boned state where DUN was half installed/half broken.

Personal PC

My personal computer which I ran my BBS on looked like this:

486DX-33
8 MB RAM
Windows 95
Maxtor 7245A  245 MB IDE hard drive, DrivesSpace compression to get 350 MB
Seagate ST351A/X  40 MB IDE hard drive, for Linux
Sony CDU-55E ATAPI CD-ROM drive
VLB EIDE controller
VLB Diamond Stealth 64 2 MB video card
Soundblaster 16 Multi-CD sound card
Colorado Jumbo 250 MB tape backup

I had a second machine that was a 286, 10 MHz on a LAN with Personal NetWare.

For Linux experimenting on my PC, my notes say I was running Slackware with kernel v1.1.59, with UMSDOS filesystem so Linux files and DOS could be on the same FAT filesystem. Looks like I was using a boot floppy disk to boot into Linux, later I used LOADLIN.

Modems were a 1428VQE, the world’s most generic external 28.8k modem, and a Zoom V.32bis


 

wcGate Satellite BAG support

I’ve been happily nerding out with vintage bulletin board system (BBS) software and UUCP to send/receive e-mail and newsgroups for a while. Something I kept seeing in BBS documentation was mention of the “.BAG format” or “UUCP BAG format” used by satellite providers when delivering Usenet feeds over satellite. I got curious about what exactly were these files and what did they contain? The term BAG or bag file never appeared in any of my UUCP books, Taylor UUCP, nor INN documentation. (Batching is mentioned, but not bags) The file type seemed oddly standardized for such a niche application and several BBS utilities claimed to understand .BAG files.

FNOS and InterGate with BAG format support

SAT 1.15 “Usenet BAG culling”


TL;DR: .BAG is simply an ASCII file containing a batch of newsgroup articles, as batched together for example by batcher(8) from INN, for easy delivery over UUCP. Also known as “rnews batching”. Instead of potentially thousands of individual files with one article each, it’s a sequence of larger file with a series of articles inside it. As the file exceeds a given size a new file is written with an incremental filename. It’s not explicitly for UUCP nor is it something that only satellite providers invented. It’s unclear if the bag term originated from satellite providers or DNews.


I’m familiar with satellite services such as Planet Connect and PageSat, which delivered a Usenet newsgroup feed, Fidonet, and other files over a over one-way satellite link. These operated at speeds between 19.2 – 128 kilobit/second. In terms of BBS usage, the receiver software would get these so-called .BAG files over the air throughout the day, write them to disk, and then some sort of tosser software would import them into the BBS message conferences. These services weren’t limited to BBSs — ISPs, businesses, and anyone else that wanted Usenet newsgroups could use them for a news feed as an alternative to fetching over their expensive Internet connections.

What I didn’t know was what was the format of these .BAG files were and was it possible to re-create them to re-create a dummy “satellite” service? After all, at the end of the day it seemed like it was just a stream of bytes that came in over a serial connection. I had so many questions: Was this some sort of binary stream with things like variable values? Binary blobs? Were the .BAG files like .ZIP archives that contained different file inside like a mix of usenet, Fido, and shareware programs?  Just ASCII text? Was it just RFC-822 messages in a stream?  Information was scarce on it but after spending quite a while searching around I finally started uncovering information.

One of the first things I found was this post to news.misc by Norman Gillaspie from PageSat in 1993. Here he goes into detail on how their satellite feeds work. Here he mentions “These files are written … with a *.bag (for mailbag) file extension”. This got me wondering if these were just Unix mbox style files that contained usenet articles.

A while later a very enlightening thing I found was from The Unix Heritage Society mailing list from 2018, when somebody else asked the same question “Does anyone know why UUCP “bag” files are called “bag”? The interesting part is when they asked one of the authors of the HoneyDanBer UUCP software and about “bag” they said they had never heard of it, so this was clearly coined somewhere else.

The thread went on to mention it was associated with the DNews software, which was popular for “suck” newsfeeds. (As opposed to IHAVE feeds where a NNTP server offers up all articles to a peer, a suck feed requests articles and stores them on the local news server saving bandwidth of taking a full feed.) For outbound feeds, DNews offered the ability to write batches of articles to a “bag file” or “rnews uucp bag” as of version 2.7. The documentation has a section called “writing uucp bag files“. The format of the .BAG file is even mentioned on the mailing list thread:

    The BAG/UUCP file format is:

    #! rnews nnnn
    ...(article, exactly nnnn bytes, counting each end of line as one byte)
    #! rnews nnnn
    ...(next article)...

This all kind of makes sense, if you’re a satellite data company and need to send files over the air, why invent some new binary file format? It’s the 90s and we haven’t gotten around to building over-complicated tech cathedrals, just do the simplest thing possible. Take the output from your news software as if it were sending to a UUCP site and shove it up to the satellite.

Admittedly as the thread ends and my own research concludes it’s still not clear how the term “bag” exactly originated. I have a hunch it was probably the satellite biz (maybe PageSat?) because news admins appear to have already had their own term for batching (“rnews batch”)? I guess somebody just called bag that and it stuck. I dug through the earliest release notes I could find for DNews and couldn’t find any further information about how their bag support came about.

File naming

I came across this old web page “Building a Satellite-News-Feed (UseNet, PlanetC)” by Juergen Helbing who goes into detail of his woe trying to get Planet Connect going in Germany. He talks about using DNews to import news from Planet Connect to his news server. There were several very interesting bits of information in this post. One was the file names used by Planet Connect:

PlanetC send out two different names of BAG-Files:

news####.zip   (NewsGroups) and
pcbin###.zip   (binary Groups)

This indicates there were different filenames based on types of content. Here news####.zip were zipped .BAG files containing batches text articles, and pcbin###.zip were zipped .BAG files containing batches of text-encoded binary groups. This was written in 1997 and he mentions Planet Connect was sending down about 400 MB of compressed articles a day, which uncompressed was about 1.5 GB per day.

Also interesting was mentioned how the Planet Connect terminal/receiver actually worked. Once the satellite, LNB, decoder, software were all installed, the software instantly starts reading the stream, had enough information to know when one file stopped and started, and just started writing files to disk. I think of this as analogous to a Zmodem/Ymodem-batch download, both of which are protocols that have headers that carry the filenames+sizes. Except it’s a one way transmission with no acknowledgements, and if there are CRC errors (he mentions this) that file is screwed as there’s no way to re-request bad blocks. I wondered if Planet Connect and other services re-broadcast files in case they were corrupt, reading an old FAQ indicates they sent some files at least twice a day but not the newsfeed itself.

Creating a .BAG with INN and send-uucp

I’ve been running the INN news server software in conjunction with my BBS to send test private newsgroup posts over UUCP. I wanted to look closer at the files being sent to see if they used this same batch format. Could a batch outfeed file from INN be treated as a .BAG file to the BBS?

First thing I discovered was my INN wasn’t set up correctly. I needed to be running send-uucp every hour on my news server, to well, batch up articles for an outbound new feed to the BBS over UUCP. This explains why BBS->INN posts worked, but I wasn’t seeing anything going INN->BBS! I also discovered I should have been filtering the news feed on the bang path, so on the first run of send-uucp I was back-feeding thousands of test posts from the BBS back to itself!

But sure enough after running send-uucp, I went and looked in my /var/spool/uucp/tuxedocatbbs/ directory for stuff spooled for the BBS. The resulting data file D.007N contained the same sort of rnews formatting mentioned from the TUHS list and DNews docs.


#! rnews 506
Path: news.wann.net!.POSTED.localhost!localhost!bwann
From: bwann@wann.net
Newsgroups: tuxedocat.test
Subject: Test 3/14 post
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:56:29 -0700
Organization: wann.net
Message-ID: <c5f44a0f-6a69-3235-e9f4-5eb692d8d52d@wann.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII
Injection-Info: uucp.wann.net; posting-host="localhost:::1";
	logging-data="168550"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@uucp.wann.net"
Xref: news.wann.net tuxedocat.test:10874

happy pi day!
#! rnews 505
Path: news.wann.net!.POSTED.localhost!localhost!bwann
From: bwann@wann.net
Newsgroups: tuxedocat.test
Subject: 3/14 test again
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:56:54 -0700
Organization: wann.net
Message-ID: <80d63cde-8ccf-b661-fc50-3447d089ea70@wann.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII
Injection-Info: uucp.wann.net; posting-host="localhost:::1";
	logging-data="168697"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@uucp.wann.net"
Xref: news.wann.net tuxedocat.test:10875

3.14!  meow

Fake .BAG import to BBS

I wanted to test my theory by seeing if I could just take this data file from the UUCP spool and import it to the BBS as a fake .BAG file. Instead of beaming the file up and down over satellite, I just scp’d it to the BBS system and renamed it.

wcGate is the software used by Wildcat! BBS to import/export messages from UUCP to the BBS message base, and includes support for satellite feeds. I created a new dummy UUCP provider called FAKESAT:

Creating dummy satellite service in MakeGate

 

I copied the raw data file over to the BBS into the incoming Satellite directory configured in MakeGate:

Next I ran wcgate import uucp h:fakesat to try to import my newly created .BAG file:

wcGate import of .BAG file

And it imports my fakesy .BAG file with test newsgroup posts to the BBS! Success!

 

Also good to know wcGate understands duplicate newsgroup posts, so I can go hog wild and set up multiple news feeds and not worry about the same article popping up repeatedly.

wcGate handling duplicate newsgroup posts

For what it’s worth when wcGate exports messages to transmit over UUCP, it uses a similar batch format except the batch is compressed as noted by the #! cunbatch header:

wcGate compressed cunbatch file

Other file types

I haven’t seen the Planet Connect or PageSat decoder software in operation, but presumably there are other file name series for other thing such as FidoNet posts, stock quotes, and whatever else they sent across the link.

A friend showed me a video that had a clip of a consumer service called SkyLink (offered by the same people at Planet Connect) in operation, which gives some idea of how file downloads from satellite could work. Apparently they had a manifest of files they sent in advance (daily? weekly?) of what would be sent over satellite. Using their software you would mark which files you were interested in, and as they came in throughout the day they would be saved to disk. The example video showed a list of .ZIP, .ARC, and .QWK files among others that could be saved. At the bottom shows a status pane with filenames, block and error counts:

According to an article about Planet Connect in Boardwatch Magazine (Jan 1994), Fidonet files were named `0000FFFF.M01` and required a TICK processor to import them.

It seems like it should be straightforward, if not at least possible, to mock up a dummy satellite service over a null modem serial connection to relive the experience. There needs to be something to assembled the file manifest to periodically “upload”, and then something sitting on the BBS/receiver side sitting there continually decoding as they come through and write them back to individual files. Again, something very similar to Ymodem-batch or Zmodem. This could be used to send a dummy newsfeed, or dummy stock quotes, weather images, or cat memes.

Bonus: while reading up on usenet and uucp, I learned that in 1983 when Australia first joined usenet articles were written to tape and FLOWN to the University of Sydney where they were ingested and distributed. This is also mentioned in the end of the O’Reilly Managing Usenet (1998) book under “Last-Resort Transmission Methods”.

The other night I was flipping through an old 1995 Computer Shopper, like you do, and wondered what the largest hard drive for sale at the time was.

Turns out it’s a Seagate ST410800N, 9 gigabyte, 5.25″ full height, SCSI drive. In other words the biggest physical form factor PC drive. Virtually all other new hard drives around this time were 3.5″ either in the half-height or now familiar 1″ height format, but this dude was 5.25″ FH. I do have experience with this form factor, such as the classic 5 megabyte ST-506 MFM and the 10 megabyte models that came in some of the IBM XTs. This one just stored 900 million times the amount of data.

Hard Drives International 1995

I kind of wanted a SCSI drive for a Novell NetWare server I had been considering building, so I could finally learn more about old SCSI. After seeing this, why shouldn’t I put the biggest, highest capacity SCSI drive in my file server? Off to eBay I went and found a really good deal on one and bought it.

The next day the eBay seller actually called me up and asked if I intended on using this or just scrap it for precious metals. I can’t imagine there’s that much rare metal in these but I don’t know. I told him I wanted to take a gamble on trying to use it, he said “alright I’ll do a good job packing it for you then.”


Sure enough, a big box arrives containing packing and another box, which contained more packing and the hard drive.

I finally got around to dissecting one of my 486s to test out the drive on an Adaptec 2840VL local bus SCSI card, and hooked it all up on my coffee table.

I wasn’t sure if it was actually going to work but I knew it would probably be a loud drive so recorded video and flipped the switch to turn it all on. Sure enough it took several seconds for the drive to get up to operating speed, a loud metallic ping of the heads releasing and then the noise of seeking.

Adaptec AHA-2840VL and ST4100800N

Miraculously, the previously untested Adaptec AH-4840VL SCSI controller just worked without needing any jiggling or finagling of my touchy VL-bus slots, and the hard drive appeared on the SCSI bus.

Media verify

From the Adaptec SCSISelect utility I started a media verify test to see how much damage the drive had. This ran for a few hours and either had zero bad sectors or they were quietly reallocated and the entire drive was still usable!

I installed MS-DOS on it, the fdisk and formatting had no problems with it being a 9 GB drive. Fdisk just created a 2 GB primary partition and MS-DOS used all of that as C:. Installed Norton Utilities and SpinRite on it too and let them run for a while, they all seemed happy with the drive too.

As far as drive performance, SpinRite tells me it’s doing about 3 megabyte/second transfers. I’m not yet an expert at SCSI but the SCSI-1 spec is 5 MB/sec, so I’d expect something around there, especially with the VL-bus SCSI adapter. I haven’t figured it out yet, may be a termination or cable problem maybe.

What I figured out the next day was that the PCB should have been on top, so I had been running this thing upside down all night long. All previous drives I’ve used like this such as the ST-506 and XT drive, the PCB was on the bottom. After turning it right side up it went squirrelly a few boots. A couple of times the Adaptec complained the host adapter wasn’t found, and a few times MS-DOS said the drive was read-only. Eventually whatever was stuck or misaligned fixed itself and it’s been running fine in the correct orientation ever since.

I had shot some video of the formatting and verification, and threw together a short video of the drive powering on and uploaded to Instagram reels.

Popularity

What I wasn’t expecting was the IG reel to take off like wildfire in popularity. Most of my reels have a couple dozen views, this thing suddenly got thousands. The likes and comments started pouring in, soon I had 100k views. People calling each other names. Then 250k, then 500k. Now I’m over 700,00 views, nearly a thousand comments, and 28k likes. Clearly the sound of this thing spinning up got people’s attention!

Looking through the comments, the breakdown seems to be something like this:

  • 80% posting a comment about how it sounds like an air raid or tornado siren, or the THX logo.
  • 15% can’t believe old tech used to be so loud/big/low capacity/expensive (I mean this was released 31 years ago), or maybe they haven’t been around long enough to see that today’s storage will be likely obsolete too.
  • 2% bro why don’t you just buy a 2 TB flash card for $20
  • Several people commented this exact same drive was used in Avid Media rigs they used for non-linear video editing and rendering. Sizes seemed to range from a couple of drives to an entire rack of 42 drives on multiple SCSI controllers.
  • At least three people said it was a fake or said it’s clearly an IDE drive dummy, despite the bigass 50-pin ribbon cable and the “Adaptec SCSI” screen.
  • At least one person stole the video, cropped it, and re-posted it to Threads as their own video.

The Avid comments were interesting. I tried to find photos of mid-1990s Avid setups but came up short.

The drive is still pretty noisy even inside a case so I’m not sure how well that’s going to work for a full time NetWare server. It might have to sit around for special occasions.

The video:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Bryan (@bryanwann)

(jesus that’s a lot of css for an embed, IG)

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