In the early 1990’s, several large network equipment vendors sold equipment targeted at large scale dial banks, including Cisco, ADTRAN, and Cabletron. These servers were often tied to banks of modems on one side, and to servers of some sort on the other, creating a dial bank. Dial banks grew in scale and sophistication on the back of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), run by dedicated system operators (SYSOPs) for the support of individual communities. At one time, there were tens of thousands, potentially even hundreds of thousands, of these systems in the United States alone, serving large communities of users. @ECI LighTALK
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