I hear you… but imho, you can usually only go back so far before you lose your audience. ;-)

I think my first modem was either a 1200 or a 2400 baud as well, and if we’re going to back that far… I can remember logging into BBSes that turned out to be outside of my “billing exchange” or something. That meant that they weren’t technically long distance calls – so you didn’t have to add 1 and the area code when dialing – but they were nonetheless an extra charge. My dad was very annoyed with me when he got those bills. He finally made me dig into the phone book to find out which exchanges were an extra charge for our area, and I printed a list of those exchanges and posted it on the frame of my monitor. Henceforth, I was no longer allowed to call any of those exchanges. (There were still dozens of BBSes that I could call within my area.)

And of course, at some point after that, Dad went ahead and subscribed to a second phone line to the house, so that I no longer monopolized the main house line.

And yeah… Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves… I had almost forgotten how many search engines we had, back then. Your mentioning that reminds me of one of my first experiments in writing my own html files: I created a miniature bar that had a select box listing a bunch of different search engines. I could select one, type in my search term next to it and hit the Search button to immediately be redirected in the frame below the bar to that engine’s results.

Good times.