ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 2000, feeling flush after getting my first proper lecturing post, I bought myself a fancy new 56 kilobit per second modem. On a good day, when other people were not using the internet at the same time, I could achieve a download speed of nearly a third of a megabyte per minute. I could even get a webpage to appear in less than 10 seconds. I was buckled in and ready to cruise along the information superhighway.
