24 Jan
2007
24 Jan
'07
11:27 a.m.
Will, maybe you could answer something I was very
curious about. I
(probably like many people on this list) was a BBS sysop who made use
of USR modems. Probably some of the best stuff in the business and
worth every nickel (particularly at sysop prices) I spent on them.
When was this? Did you ever order modems online, using the USR BBS? I
wrote the front end to that thing, although Jack Rubin does not
remember it. I was a youngun at the time, so I take no responsibility
if the front end sucked.
Upgrades however, were puzzling. Sometimes, USR
wanted me to ship
the old modem back (sans wall wart), other times they didn't care.
The most bizarre case when when a firmware upgrade was done and USR
wanted the old SRAM chip returned. No one at USR could tell me what
they expected to do with an old 8K (?) chip. Certainly not re-use it
in a product(!).
So you mean SRAM or EPROM? For a while some of the higher end stuff
had an EPROM supply problem. The modems used 32020 DSPs, with a big
WaferScale Integration EPROM. WSI ran into production problems and
could not supply the parts very well, so USR had to make a piggyback
dual chip kludge using smaller WSI EPROMs. Perhaps with the upgrade
they wanted the proper, bigger EPROM back, to be reused.
USR also ran into a problem with people trying to scam them, often
returning fake modems (I saw some rather convincing PCMCIA fakes) to
try to get credit. Perhaps they wanted a piece back to confirm you
actually had a modem.
Or just plain old stupidity.
--
Will