First Router

Tokyo Metallic Communications launched ADSL service. The dial-up crowd were in a frenzy.

Always-on internet. The phrase sounds unremarkable now. Back then it was dazzling. The internet ran over phone lines. You couldn't make calls while connected. Line speed was 64Kbps. Thousands of times slower than a modern smartphone. Even if it was only during the Tehodai flat-rate hours, it was still the internet. ADSL promised something vastly faster. It was a revolution.

I was broke then, living hand to mouth. I had about fifteen hundred dollars in my account, saved for emergencies.

ADSL required a router. Something to bridge the modem to Ethernet. I bought a YAMAHA RT140e, an enterprise-grade router, with every last dollar I had. That box became my gateway to the internet.

Enterprise-grade meant no GUI. You configured it by command line. NAT settings, packet filtering, PPPoE connections. I typed each line while reading the manual.

Looking back, that command syntax has barely changed. YAMAHA's current 2026 models still use nearly the same format. Routers, TCP/IP, the lower layers — they are astonishingly stable technology. Web frameworks appear and vanish every year. The plumbing beneath them does not.

About fifteen hundred dollars was a lot of money for a router. But without that box, I would not be doing this work today.