This concept is a little weird to think about today, but the Internet used to be accessed through regular voice phone lines. You'd plug your computer into the p

This concept is a little weird to think about today, but the Internet used to be accessed through regular voice phone lines. You'd plug your computer into the phone network with a little thing called a modem. In the really early days you actually had to use an acoustic coupler for regulatory reasons. Then you dialed the phone number of the computer you wanted to connect to - most of which were not running the Internet Protocol! Typical computer systems you would dial into would include... 1. Proprietary data services (AOL, Compuserve, etc) 2. BBS systems - typically individual computers running services that let you send messages or files to other users who could then dial in to receive them. Some BBSes were even networked to one another, the largest of such systems being Fidonet 3. Remotely-managed IT equipment - the sort of thing depicted in the movie. 4. Mainframes - universities and large businesses would often have remote access that you'd dial into. This is roughly equivalent to SSHing into an Internet-connected machine today. 5. The Internet - originally only through remote access to mainframes (#4). Later on, data services (#1) started offering open Internet access. (notoriously, AOL utterly demolished USENET's existing cultural norms by doing this) Then companies started just selling dial-in Internet access without other services and this became the dominant use case for modems. This concept was inverted starting in the late 90s. First, phone companies started offering "digital subscriber lines" (DSL) that provided way more bandwidth to connect to an ISP with. Then, (at least in North America, thanks to various Sega Genesis related reasons) cable companies got in on this and started offering "broadband Internet", too. With the greater bandwidth of these services, it suddenly made sense to send Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) instead of Internet Protocol over Voice. So dedicated landline channels became very outdated very quickly, and today we think of voice as just something you send over a multitude of Internet apps.