[ceautery]

Modem manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place back then. It was already expensive to have hardware chips that supported every available connection protocol, and the extra horsepower you needed to support, say, BTLZ error correction had to come from somewhere. So either add more hardware to the modem, or offload that work to the slow computer CPUs of the late 90s (when Winmodems first came out) which weren't up for the task.

I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The best I could do for my users then was to configure their init strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error correction.

Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned.

[Scoundreller]

He got banned several months later. Difficult to see why (maybe posts removed)? But a lot of people used "password" or whatever as their password in 2001, so not unusual to see old accounts axed.