23 Apr
2012
23 Apr
'12
7:51 a.m.
On 4/23/2012 1:03 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 04/22/2012 10:09 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
>
> I was on the industrial side of USR (Total Control rack mount stuff). Very
> high quality, and very reliable. The problem was that due to various
> production problems, build quality was low, and yeild was terrible.
We bought quite a few Total Control racks at Digex,
a few hundred of
them. They were very nice boxes. I still have two of them; I nearly
broke my toe on one just this afternoon.
-Dave
Yes, I remember selling and supporting those total control racks. We
never sold many of them, and they were fairly high priced. There was a
serial connection for management in the back of them. Pretty
straight-forward to manage, IIRC.
USR was *the* modem company for a long time. I loved their products.
I still have a Courier dual-standard that supported both 14.4k AND
16.8k. Great modem. It's like a foot+ deep, flat, but I loved the
printed hayes command set reference printed on the bottom.
I think I still have a kick-ass USR modem card too. Maybe PCI, or ISA.
And I used a sportster for a long time. I will say that towards the end
of the modem-era, it seemed like power surges on the telephone line used
to fry the relay regularly. It never happened for years and years, and
then it happened perhaps twice in two years. I eventually ran it
through a UPS for surge protection, and that prevented future problems.
Keith