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by Scoundreller 947 days ago
I suspect they enjoyed talking to me because I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body).

It was a no-name 486 DX2 66MHz from "Consumer's Distributing" (defunct soviet-style Canadian retailer), and a cheap model at that. 8250 was probably a cost-cutting measure they felt like they could get away with.

Most people probably bought internal modems so these UART issues wouldn't pop up. But we had bad experiences with IRQ conflicts locking up the mouse on a previous computer. Not an issue with Lynx/Pine/etc, but we wanted GUI and Netscape, so we were trying to avoid that. Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

It was a lot of calls, so I dutifully reinstalled the drivers and tried a lot of dialer strings.
2 comments
dicriseg 947 days ago
> Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?).

Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM pair.

This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf

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Scoundreller 947 days ago
It was probably unusual for this ISP to deal with a bargain basement computer, but a premium external modem, and the incompatibilities that can result.
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devilbunny 945 days ago
> I sounded like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body)

You probably sounded like a generic adult woman at that age. Much younger, and your physical size keeps you from having the same resonance as an adult; much older, and your voice has started cracking.

But when I was 11 or 12, I could order pizza delivery, and they would always close with "Thanks for your order, Mrs. Devilbunny". Never got shunted off to the "I need to speak with an adult in the home to place this order" line.

It was kinda neat, although I never really thought of ways I could exploit it. (I wasn't devious enough at the time.) And then when I got devious enough, I had to wait two or three more years until the cracking stopped completely and I could be believed as an adult again.

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