Remember the nightmare of soft modems? They were a combined audio and modem sharing the same DSP chipset. They were terrible and shipped with a lot of PCs. I th

Remember the nightmare of soft modems? They were a combined audio and modem sharing the same DSP chipset. They were terrible and shipped with a lot of PCs. I think they finally worked out the kinks when cable modems and DSL became an option. There were also a neat series of adapters starting in the late 90s that were combined modems with telephone line loop nics. All the NICs plugged into the same telephone line would see each other on the network. Windows had an option to share Internet connection and even autoconnect a modem when another PC needed an internet connection.