[SpiritWarrior]

IDK, that modem sound evokes negative flashbacks for me. Waiting for pages to load, redialing to get a better connection. Resetting because the connection was dropped. I used to turn the noise off after a time. And this present-day practice of streaming video was incomprehendable at that time. Those flash videos you see on game websites, showcasing the latest trailer for an upcoming title - you'd never see them anywhere on the web back then. At most a website had that horrible low-bit nintendo music added to it. Even now, things have changed so much that it is a rare site that has music on it because its just so annoying.

But then there was great aspects about the internet back then. The thrill of connecting to the world. The free access the internet afforded. Chatrooms. Email - people thought they were elite to have an email address. The innocence of downloading MP3's and not referring to it as piracy, because the laws had yet to deem it so. There was this mindset where people assumed since they weren't getting an actual CD or casette with a cover on it (CD-burners had not hit the mainstream yet - for that matter PC's and modems had barely scratched the surface!), that having just the digital format of the song was okay because it would only play on the computer and wasn't actually "real". The internet was just so new and most lawmakers were from a generation that had trouble even understanding it, nevermind make laws for it. There's something to be said of the way things were. Remember they would call it the "world wide web" on TV rather than just "the internet"? lol. Now you never hear that really.