You are traveling back in time...

My earliest memory of my Dad's engineering career was when he attended a conference while we were on family vacation. It must have been 1970 or thereabouts. The conference was on the new digital subscriber line technology, or ISDN.
Flash forward 30 years and we find that ISDN never really took off, but is available widely if you know the magic secret handshake that will persuade your 'phone company to admit that it is available.
In my case I learned the magic while talking to the local phone company engineering manager. He had taken pitty on me and called me in person to explain why I couldn't get T-1 service (see previous post). We chatted a bit about the equipment they used for service in our area. In passing he mentioned that the remote terminals could take any kind of line card available for the TDM bus, which included POTS, various kinds of multi-line multiplexing cards, and also ISDN. I asked if that meant ISDN service was available and he said it was.
Many weeks later, after tracking down the correct sales department at the phone company in Denver we were able to order an ISDN circuit. There then followed a period of intense confusion where it became apparent that there were exactly zero ISDN circuits deployed in our area and it would be the first time the local technical staff had put one in. The switch, it seemed, didn't have the necessary software (I'm sure it did, but probably the phone company hadn't paid for that option to be enabled). So our circuit was 'back-hauled' 125 miles from the nearest big city, Billings, where an ISDN-capable switch was available.
Eventually we had our 128Kbits ISDN Internet connection. I forget exactly the cost but the circuit was around $150/month and then the ISDN capable 'port' at UUNet was another $150/month or so.
I have repressed the memory of everything that went into buying and configuring a router that would connect to UUNet via ISDN. It would take some major hypnosis to recover that information.
I do remember that on the 128Kbits connection it only took a day to download one CD ISO image.