The Curse of Dialup World

I too ran a small ISP from 1995-1997 or so, and the biggest gift I got from one of my co-founders was the strong suggestion we use this new cheap database called mSQL [1] as the basis of our accounting system. And I did. I wrote a lot of terrible, undergrad-in-cs C code around it, but we never messed up on billing. Thanks, Kent!<p>Now that time I hadn&#x27;t verified that our backups were working and lost all of our data, that was a little less good.<p>[1] not a typo, it still exists, though I doubt anyone would use it over MySQL, postgres, or sqlite. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MSQL" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MSQL</a>

What would truly keep you up at night is how many small&#x2F;medium businesses still do stuff like this.<p>One small business I have seen just has tonnes of word documents sitting in a single folder, with a mix of customer details, invoices, etc. To write a new invoice they copy an old one, then change the details, save it with a new name with a &quot;system&quot; (that changed over the years).<p>Up until semi-recently I saw a small-medium sized business (hired quite a few people) that did all of their accounting _by hand_, for hundreds to thousands of transactions. They had an old lady that came in to manually run their accounts on a calculator and it took several days.<p>A small business I once dealt with had a small black book (A6?) that was all written in note form, scattered, not dated, random important scribbles everywhere, mix of cash and card (not documented) - it was a nightmare. Somehow they had a good reputation in the local area, but behind the scenes it was pure chaos.

Dial-up World was consumed in a “roll-up”, which was popular right up to about 2005 when the only dialup ISPs were rural.<p>The problem with pivoting to broadband was, most could not. The only option was reselling DSL, becoming a CLEC or WISP, and taking the dirt nap. The company I worked for tried everything and eventually went out of business after the dialup was sold in a rollup.<p>I was at a 123.net colo a few years ago, and off in a rack was half consumed by Livingston&#x2F;Lucent and US Robotics Total Control dial-up T1 endpoints, running. The USR actually showed signs of use.

The article appears to build up though a chain of bad business and technical decisions to something &quot;delightfully and poetically dysfunctional&quot;, but what that thing actually is stays frustratingly implicit and doesn&#x27;t actually make sense to me.<p>As far as I can tell it&#x27;s this: Their user management consisted of an excel sheet, but their billing was based on physical piles of filled out signup forms. A user cancelling their contract was implemented by (only) removing their physical from, but this was not communicated to the acquiring company, so they started billing customers who had cancelled.<p>But then how did they stop cancelled customers from using the service? How did they <i>implement</i> a user authentication mechanism in the first place? There must have been a software representation of user records somewhere in their system, which was kept up to date with cancellations. And the acquirer never learned about that, which would have just been a dub mistake, not exactly delightful or poetic.<p>Unless... they somehow managed to have the dialup system query the excel sheet directly and never stopped cancelled customers from using the service because they assumed those had switched to broadband anway and wouldn&#x27;t want to use free dialup even if they could.<p>These would have been a much more interesting WTF than the mere existence of the Excel sheets and piles of physical forms, and I would expect them to be mentioned explicitly.<p>So... what gives?

<p><pre><code> - When a customer submitted their signup form to Dialup World, they would add a row for that new customer to their 20,000-row Excel spreadsheet. Then, they would put that signup form in a pile with all the other signup forms of customers who had signed up on that day of the month. - Every day, they would find which one of the 31 piles of literal signup forms corresponded to that day of the month. - Then, they’d charge the customers in that pile, one by one, for a month of service. </code></pre> Well, if you hop into a time machine and need dial-up access from &quot;Dialup World&quot; back in the 1990s, I guess there&#x27;s a sweet hack -- sign up on the 31st of the month and you only get billed 7 times a year.

I started and ran a small early (UK) ISP in the 90s! I can&#x27;t remember how we did the billing but it was better than that. I suspect that it involved awk with : separated fields, because I remember my dyslexic colleague saying that all he could see was swimming : characters... And I (still) like awk.<p>I had more incoming phone lines than the rest of the street sometimes (this business was run from home), at several addresses around London as we moved. And we broke each telco&#x27;s billing system in a new and interesting way...

&gt; If you don’t work somewhere that rewards curiosity, find somewhere else to work.<p>I wish everyone had this privilege.

I&#x27;ve never had an ISP that I&#x27;ve liked since the dialup days. I remember liking a couple of the ISPs that I had at that time a lot, but EnterAct in Chicago is the one I remember most distinctly. They were very transparent about what was going on, provided great service, and did things like offer different numbers for different 56k protocols so you could get the best speeds and stability depending on which modem you owned.<p>Unfortunately EnterAct was eventually sold to some larger company and DSL became more popular.

Wow, so many screwups...<p>1: Did the billing system (and its problems) show up in due diligence?<p>2: Did they ever figure out who leaked all the passwords and sue them? (Honestly, given that this generally soured the acquisition, the perpetrator could have been on the hook for a lot of money.)<p>(Now, before you jump to the leaker&#x27;s defense, remember that in tech, things can change fast, and we all will end up working for an obsolete or acquired company at some time. Part of the game isn&#x27;t pissing on the seat on the way out.)

This story hits home pretty hard. My first gig in the industry, so to speak, was working at one of the last few independently owned dialup ISPs in midwest in 2005. I first started as a phone tech, where I did everything from help folks get connected and configure their email clients to basic computer tech support. Sometimes I&#x27;d get dispatched to do an on-site install. There was also the dirty old man customer that was constantly getting his computer infected on shady porn sites, and we eventually turned on our web filter service for him gratis, because his wife was constantly embarrassed to keep paying to bring the computer in for service.<p>Eventually became a Jr. Sysadmin, cut my teeth on managing Apache HTTPD, MySQL, qmail, built my first Linux server compiling Gentoo from Stage 1 on a dual 700 MHz Pentium 3 box. Learned so much from an awesome old school Linux sysadmin who, like me, got his start as a young kid at this very ISP. Oh, and I had access to 8 bonded T1s, which when the fastest consumer bandwidth I could ever dream of was a consumer cable modem with 3 Mbit down, and 256kbit up, being able to surf day in and day out on 12 Mbit of bandwidth was blazing fast.<p>However, like every other dialup ISP, much like the story goes in the OP, this little ISP was far too entrenched in their Dialup install. We did offer DSL service, but we were effectively a reseller to the larger ISPs in the area, so for customers that did switch over, we either offered poorer service, or they were paying more for the same service they could get direct from the bigger ISP. We were suffering from consumer attrition as the great ISP consolidation was happening, and the money was getting tight. A startup looked to be our savior - they wanted to deploy WiMAX (this was before Sprint bought up all the WiMAX spectrum for their form of 4G) to the region. What was originally pitched as a full acquisition became an acquisition of our customer list and some of our services like our shared hosting. Spoiler alert, those jokers didn&#x27;t know what they were doing, people started leaving the company left and right, eventually equipment started failing and the people that knew how to fix those things took their knowledge with them, and eventually, my paychecks started bouncing, so I left.<p>Personally one of the most rewarding jobs I ever had. I learned so much, got paid quite well for very little &quot;work&quot;, and it really set a course for the rest of my professional career. But hoo, the death spiral story that OP showed gave me a stark reminder of the very bad end times of that time in my life.<p>Also, I wonder if OP is talking about GlobalPOPS as the company that bought all the dialup ISPs that they worked for.

20,000 phone lines in 12 cities would be like 70 PRIs per city? It&#x27;s a big order, but doesn&#x27;t seem like one that MCI wouldn&#x27;t happily cover. Unless &quot;city&quot; means &quot;suburb&quot;, and not like major metro market. Just nerding out, because I ran (tech for) a mid-sized ISP in the late 90&#x27;s.

&gt; otherwise “surf the web” as people honest to god called it,<p>What else to call it ? browsing the web ?

I like that they at least had _A_ process rather than none.