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My dad swore I'd break my modem downloading stuff at 2 AM
He told me the phone line could only handle 30 minutes of connection before it fried the card, so I set a kitchen timer every time I went on Prodigy. Six months later the modem was fine, but that timer is STILL stuck in my head anytime I hear a dial tone.
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nora_barnes22d ago
See I gotta push back on this... your dad might've been onto something. Those old dial-up modems were finicky as hell, and the phone company actually had limits on how long a single connection could last without triggering a maintenance flag. I fried a US Robotics Sportster doing exactly what you did, downloading a wall of text from some BBS around 3 AM. The card literally melted a little, smelled like burnt plastic and regret. Plus the timer trick kept you honest about your time, which is more than most of us had back then. So maybe your dad's caution saved you from a worse fate...
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tarak1722d ago
Oh wow, you're not wrong about those Sportsters. That burnt plastic smell is something you never forget, is it. Guess our dads knew a thing or two about keeping the phone company off our backs.
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