Those old modem upgrades

MUDs were singlehandedly responsible for my pathetic GPA in my first year and a half of university, especially because it worked great from the terminal servers to just telnet out, so I could play from anywhere, and did. A girl I visited showed me a sign at her college indicating MUDding was prohibited in the computer labs, but the techs were playing too, so I doubt it was ever enforced.

I'm a 90's baby so I missed this era of online play. But I remember the hours it would take to download an MMORPG like Ragnarok haha. When that went down to just a few minutes I had the same magical holy sh*t moment.

Improving latency sometimes matters more than bandwidth. On paper, upgrading from a 56K modem to 64kbps ISDN doesn't sound like much, but the dramatically lower latency made for much snappier web browsing.