[ghewgill]

MajorBBS could handle multiple lines on its own, but you had to handle ALL of the lines with one box. That meant a serial port interface like DigiBoard which provided some number (8 or 16 or more) of serial ports that you would connect to modems.

[jamroom]

Yep - I ran a 16 line Major BBS back in the mid 90's in Seattle - used what was called a "Bocaboard" - had 16 serial ports on it - plugged in 16 external USR 28.8 modems. It all ran off of one PC.

[icedchai]

I remember DigiBoard from my early ISP days. We attempted to turn a mid 90's-era Linux system (Slackware) into a terminal server. The Linux drivers for DigiBoard weren't quite up to it so we wound up going with Telebit Netblazers, I think.

[kstrauser]

I think we used RocketPorts for a while until switching to Livingston Portmaster 3s, which you plugged a T-1 into.

[icedchai]

Portmasters were very popular. Later on the ISP I worked with moved on to Ascend boxes which had digital modems (T1 / PRI lines.)

PRI was a huge step. The "individual modem" days were a mess. Each modem had a serial cable, phone line, and power brick. I remember doing some maintenance in one of the POPs. There were at least 100 modems, stacked on a cheap plastic shelving unit. The shelving unit was sagging from the weight and heat of all the modems.

This early POP was haphazardly built, so no cable management. I remember a river of phone cables coming out of the wall. The power bricks were also crazy. We had power strips 2 or 3 levels deep, making it a hazard to even get behind the rack without tripping on something.

[kstrauser]

They'd already switched to PRIs before I started so I missed out on that "fun", but I can personally vouch to the younguns here that every word you just wrote was completely plausible and likely.

[jacquesm]

Portmasters were a godsend. They turned piles of gear into clean boxes at a fraction of the heat and mess.