Little me kinda liked that sound — it meant I was going online! Though I kept wondering how is it that when you pick up the phone while downloading something y

Little me kinda liked that sound — it meant I was going online! Though I kept wondering how is it that when you pick up the phone while downloading something you just hear seemingly random constant static, yet somehow the computer decoded that into useful things. And how you were able to download multiple files from different places simultaneously over a single phone line. It felt a bit like magic. It was much later that I learned about the packet-switched nature of the internet.