Many fond memories from using ISDN, but there was also some frustration. How far you were from the Central Office played a critical role on whether you could get ISDN and I was at the limit. Ended up switching equipment more than once trying to find the perfect device that could deal with whatever signal issues came from being around 15,000 wire feet from the CO.
Haven't seen much mentioned about it but as I recall ISDN was also symmetrical vs analog modems which had a small back channel. Equal upload speed made it easy to keep up with sites that enforced a sharing ratio.
ISDN also exposed the call setup information sort of like caller ID did on analog lines, but it came over the control channel instead of between ring one and ring two on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line. Some ISDN devices had call handling that was pretty sophisticated - a precursor to Asterix and like software/customer managed PBXs. The upshot was you could screen and reject calls prior to their tying up one of your channels. And if you did want to take a voice call, you could take one channel down and still have a 64k network connection going while your wife used the other to talk to her sister. Huge wife acceptance factor vs "Don't pick up the phone, I'm using the computer!"
Haven't seen much mentioned about it but as I recall ISDN was also symmetrical vs analog modems which had a small back channel. Equal upload speed made it easy to keep up with sites that enforced a sharing ratio.
ISDN also exposed the call setup information sort of like caller ID did on analog lines, but it came over the control channel instead of between ring one and ring two on a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line. Some ISDN devices had call handling that was pretty sophisticated - a precursor to Asterix and like software/customer managed PBXs. The upshot was you could screen and reject calls prior to their tying up one of your channels. And if you did want to take a voice call, you could take one channel down and still have a 64k network connection going while your wife used the other to talk to her sister. Huge wife acceptance factor vs "Don't pick up the phone, I'm using the computer!"