One-hundred miles from my home is the town that I grew up in, and it is there that my parents still live. On June 8th, 2026, Windstream was nagging its customers about the shutdown of legacy ADSL Internet service and how you must schedule an appointment to get a fibre optic line installed to your premises. To make sure you wouldn't forget, Windstream would periodically shut off your Internet service, and to wake the connection back up you would have to open a web browser and acknowledge a notice that would appear as the first tab to open.
Enter the Arlo security cameras: the Internet connection had gone down again and my parents needed to check the camera feed urgently. Well, they weren't home, so they could not get access to the cameras as they weren't able to reach the Internet! And that's where my remote Linux machine saved the day:
At their house is a Dell Precision 380 running Linux Mint xfce tucked under a table into a corner that is connected to the landline. An mgetty daemon opens a serial console over the dial-up modem, so I call it the "time sharing system". The phone line WAS accepting inbound connections even when the ADSL Internet service was so rudely shut off, because the Internet and phone were different services despite being served by the same telco over the same copper wire. In a stroke of genius, I fired up the very same IBM 5150 you see on this table, turned on my 2400bps dial-up modem and called the phone number of my childhood home. Sure enough, I got through to the time sharing system, and from this 42 year old computer at the other end of a hundred mile long 19th century umbilical cord I was able to fire up the text-based web browser Lynx.
The nagscreen came down the wire onto my Tandy CM-11 CGA display, I accepted the notice, and my parents got back to me moments later saying the Arlo cameras were once again operational.
This contents of this webpage formed a plaque that sat on one of my exhibit tables at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 21 on Sunday, Sep. 13th, 2026.
Argot
Page created: Sunday, September 20th, 2026