The Dial-up Modem

Children of the 90s and early 2000s... cherish this sound. Your children and your children's children will never experience the primitive yet beautiful sound of the dial-up modem.

They will never experience waiting up to three minutes for the AOL browser screen to move from "Dialing" to "Checking Password" before loading up a webpage in just shy of a minute and the AOL lady beamed "Welcome to AOL" with the major exci...tement of "You have email!"

Champion that moment when your parents shouted at you because they couldn't make a phone-call while you sat there waiting 4 minutes for a thirty second 2" x 1" video to load!

Raise a glass to the frustrating moment when the connection abruptly failed in the middle of loading that news article, and the AOL lady uttered "Goodbye" and you'd have to try to log-in again, possibly being unable to do so for a whole 24 hours while the internet servers were down.

Hold your head up high: you were there. You battled through the phenomenon of the insufferable pop-up. You were the generation for whom the animated GIF and 16bit colour was the cutting edge, truly ground-breaking. You were the children who when they hear "floppy disk" hear the clicking grind of the 1MB item of wonder that could move files and documents from one computer to another.

Stand proud. In the age of BlueRay, 20meg broadband, USB dongles, digital television, High Definition, 3D display, the Gigabyte... know that you were part of the world that got there.