I never had a modem. In 2000 I was attending University living in a student hostel which had Internet by grace of allocated state budget. It was horrifyingly sl

I never had a modem. In 2000 I was attending University living in a student hostel which had Internet by grace of allocated state budget. It was horrifyingly slow. No idea what the original connection was, but distributed through coaxial cable Ethernet to hundreds of students rooms, it was barely usable. Also I had no idea what I was doing, porn was one thing if by that you understand navigating webrings on Altavista and leaving one image to download overnight hoping by morning at least it starts to show something. First time I saw real Internet on my first job in 2001, a satellite downlink connection at 256 Kbit/sec (uplink was a regular modem), I couldn't believe such speed was possible. On the other hand the local LAN was a nonstop LAN-party, reaching peak usage during exams season, when everyone should have been learning but obviously they were hardly doing that between Counterstrike rounds and such.