dial-up experiences (was Re: question aaout ISP's)

I worked for a real estate software house in the mid-late 80s. We were doing online photos of listed properties starting in the '85-'86 timeframe. By modern standards the images were tiny, maybe 160x100 and 4-bit greyscale, but at 2400 baud, the 15 kBytes would have been a bit painful. We were out at the bleeding edge of higher-speed dialup from the beginning of the product. Display was accomplished by a "dumb" board we added to the Esprit terminals. It was a marble machine -- looked for the correct control code (just one character, sigh) then clocked in the next 15 k bytes. It could overlay either one quarter of the screen or the whole screen with the image, since it was inserted into the video circuit as well as the serial interface. Once it started loading an image, it ate all bytes coming in until it had counted far enough, so errors or spurious modem noise was very troublesome. The first installation used Motorola/UDS 208A/B modems, 4800 baud half duplex units that could be strapped for two wire or four wire operation. We used the EC100 error-corrector units with them. After that first site, we went through a whole series of v.29 9600 baud modems: Fastcomm, Data Race, eventually Multi-Tech when they finished theirs. v.29 was half-duplex on the wire, so we called these devices "ping pong" modems. (There were other nicknames: Fastbroke, Rat Race, Multi-wreck, etc.) We looked at other (better) things too, but didn't sell them because they were too expensive. For a while, we had two Telebit Trailblazers, one in answer mode in the computer room, and the other connected to my SB-180 at home (_really_ nice!). We looked at Couriers too. But the v.32 modems won, so it was Multi-Techs, Practical (Pregnant) Peripherals, etc. The host computers were Prime minis, which were notorious for crappy handshaking, so we spent lots of time fine tuning buffer sizes and modem setups. We had the Data Race folks on site in South Bend for a couple of days at one point figuring out why stuff was getting lost (hysteresis was too large for the modem's buffer). After I left the company, a buddy called me for troubleshooting help. Could I call x-and-such number and see how fast I could connect. My personal Courier locked at max rate. Drove him nuts, as the units they were selling, being cheap junk, couldn't do it. Couriers rocked. Still do, if you still do dialup. De