42718.net - 90s dial-up ISP & vintage computer homelab
42718.net aims to be my collection of articles, howtos and systems overview documenting the fun I'm having with this vintage technology. Life often gets in the way but I love tinkering with old systems, occasionally repairing broken things and connecting with people over discord or in real life and share stories and help each other out. Like the old days ;-)
The 42718.net dial-up ISP is an attempt to run a replica of a 90s dial-up Internet Service Provider in a lab environment, using the equipment that was in use back in the days. Over the years I have collected some fun systems and network gear and have put it all together just to be able to toy around with it and re-live the experience from the 90s.
The network side is built around a Cisco 7204VXR with an NPE-300 and a Cisco 2911 router functioning as a telephony switch with a set of T1 links connecting to the Portmaster3 as well as 24 analogue lines. Dial-in is provided by individual modems, a USR Netserver/16 and a Livingston Portmaster3 (for 56k support). There is a Cisco DSLAM for local ADSL testing but that project is something for a rainy day in the future. See network for how it hangs together and dial-in for the numbers.
Some of my systems are part of the ISP lab as they provide essential services that you would have experienced in the 9s or early 2000s. It includes a SUN SPARCclassic (terminal server ans shell host) running SunOS 5.6 and a SUN Cobalt Raq3i for hosting, email and DNS. The workstations include an IBM Thinkpad with Windows98 and other systems from that era, mainly home computers that I used (or wanted) back in the day as well as more advanced SUN and SGI systems. I've listed a few here online systems.
The lab is of course powered off by default of course as power consumption is high and running this 24x7 without supervision is a fire hazard. Ping me if you would like to see how we can connect - an open dialin number is on the list of things I'm working on, or check the links for some 24x7 available environments.