People take it for granted but it’s actually such a cool bit of engineering, we had a world-changing technology, but it would take decades to get lines set up and wouldn’t really be too useful until then. But engineers realized by literally playing and listening to beeps over an existing widespread utility in phone lines, you’ve just given almost everyone access to the internet overnight, with almost 0 infrastructure cost.
People take it for granted but it’s actually such a cool bit of engineering, we had a world-changing technology, but it would take decades to get lines set up and wouldn’t really be too useful until then. But engineers realized by literally playing and listening to beeps over an existing widespread utility in phone lines, you’ve just given almost everyone access to the internet overnight, with almost 0 infrastructure cost.
Today I found out dial-up literally used the phone lines.
All the pieces were there, I just never thought about it.