ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief historical overview of modems and their development, from business and military applications to their eventual entrance into the home consumer market. Each generation of modem users has its own set of memories, its own unique nostalgia, because each generation of modem users has worked under a different set of technological affordances and constraints. The chapter examines the ways social spaces of the Internet shifted as larger populations of users became able to access them, and the ways in which that ease of access permanently altered those spaces. It explores the habits and practices encouraged by the now-obsolete modems of the 1990s, the 14.4k and 56k dial-up modems which enabled and defined the “Information Superhighway” era of the Internet. Technology companies are shifting away from the product cycles we have come to consider “traditional”.
