The Dial-Up Modem

The dial-up modem was how most people first reached the internet. Descended from AT&T’s 300-bit-per-second Bell 103 of 1962, consumer modems peaked at 56 kilobits per second in the late 1990s. To get online you dialled a number and listened to the modem’s famous screech — a handshake of tones negotiating the noisy phone line — then waited as pages crept in. It hogged the household phone, so calls and the web could not share a line. Always-on broadband, dozens of times faster, overtook it through the 2000s, and dial-up faded to a memory of patient, tone-filled evenings.