On 12/27/18, P.J. Westerhof <Peter@isoc.nl> wrote:
some modems caused technical issues with installed telephone infrastructure.
There were power level regulations in modem standards. Sure maybe some linecards weren't well designed and protected, or the switch was buggy, etc.
customery flat rate for local telephone use meant that you could get on the Internet almost indefinitely if an Internet access point was within reach, f.i. university or library.
Fun to dial out from their own modem banks once on their terminals... and so the daisy chain went, around the world.
wonder the phone companies were quick to change their tariffs to usage based.
Similarly BBS's and ISP's didn't like you tacking up all their circuits 24x7, "nobody else could get on", so they had kick timers, fees, even bans. Today's ethernet packet switching just gets slow and droppy instead. Now people can emulate some of the old modem hardware, and software boards and games that got preserved and opensourced ported or cloned, over SSH over and within encrypted anonymous overlay networks for fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Bell https://github.com/wwivbbs/wwiv