A couple decades ago laptops & smartphones were still out of reach for students and most business people didn't need them either, so they were much less popular

A couple decades ago laptops & smartphones were still out of reach for students and most business people didn't need them either, so they were much less popular. Land lines were still almost universal, even though they have always been somewhat expensive. The Bell telephone monopoly was required to subsidize residential lines by charging higher prices for business customers. Broadband internet was still uncommon and dial-up was still spreading fast. By 2001 most Windows PCs had built-in phone modems easily sending and recieving faxes as files over any convenient land line wall jack without need for a fax machine, using the Windows XP Faxing & Scanning routine not much differently than back under W9x, when laptops were much more rare and usually needed peripheral modems. A scanner was only needed for faxing pieces of paper which you did not have in a printable Windows file format, and a Windows printer was only needed when you wanted pieces of paper from the fax files you received. Printing apps, like Word, Excel, or Acrobat could select Windows fax output as if it was a printer and it would call your target phone number and print on their machine, retrying if the line was busy, and recalling at intervals if needed. Regardless if the target fax number had a real fax machine connected or another PC modem set for fax-receive mode. Of course all of this was available for DOS before Windows became popular, using third party software, it's just the kind of thing office people wouldn't want to do without if the electronics is the least bit capable. And the real smartphones, which were already disappearing before the arrival of iPhones and other touchscreen models, had built-in analog phone modems. When you connected the phone to your laptop using IR, USB or the later Bluetooth, then Windows drivers were installed including a virtual COM port. The modem in the phone would then connect to the PC COM port and behave similar to the first external phone modems, as the modems were designed to interace the COM port on the back of an IBM PC or mainframe to an ordinary telephone line. Before cellular carriers offered a data plan you could still dial-up to AOL and get on the web to browse or email, or directly call or receive calls from fax machines. Anywhere you had cellular service and battery power. As for Gravis, I would hope the old DOS drivers for Gravis joysticks of the '80's are still there in Windows for when you plug in a soundcard having an analog joystick/midi port. Naturally this had some of the most useful settings for non-Gravis joysticks . . .