Working in a store I had to use this kind of setup to dial through next week’s order:
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It doesn’t SEEM that long ago that I was so proud of my new 2400 baud modem.
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I had a 14.4k modem. It was state of the art but the most exciting thing was upgrading to a 56.6k
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Yeah - I remember 14.4k modems and keeping others from using the phone when I wanted to contact BBS’s and download my mail.
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But 2400 baud was such an upgrade from my 1200 baud, which was such an upgrade from a 300 baud.
And yes, I was so overjoyed when I was able to buy a 56k baud modem. I guess after that I got a DSL line.
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My first modem was a 300 baud. 
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Yeah DSL was HUGE! It was 10 times faster than dial up and you could use the phone at the same time. Nowadays I have 900mbit download which is ridiculous.
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The home computer on which i learned to programme as a teenager:
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With a straight face I can also say learning how key was probably the most valuable thing I learned in HS. Used it my whole life.
I highly recommend cool-retro-term, with it’s cathode pulsing, burn through, and jiggling if you really want to revisit the old days:
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Oh man, the hours i wasted by staring at screens like that… 
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Were they wasted? I suspect you wouldn’t be ‘here’ today if you hadn’t wasted all those hours 
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True. Very. (But my parents really worried about me, as i spent day and night with programming the computer, to make it do, frankly, useless things)
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My parents thought I was working on my Masters project and I was MUDDing on the mainframe terminals in 24 hour labs. I can’t say it was productive, but it was fun and I met people from all over the world (several international visitors back in the day, and I also visited one in Romania). Very formative I think…to see other countries and know people from other countries (much rarer back then).
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Only two things I remember, that you could call old school.
These things were big in romania before 2000
And I remember using Norton commander when I was in kindergarten.
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It probably didn’t detect anything back then, either 
I remember one of those - It went W Isralies and X Arabs fought over Y oil wells for for Z days. Who won? If the numbers were crunched correctly (i.e. did the right operation at each step), turning the calculator over showed “ShellOil”.
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Does anyone remember CP/M? That was my first desktop computer OS.
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I was exposed to it. I thought its command mnemonics sucked, but from a pure technical standpoint, it was superior to DOS.
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In my first programming classes we had to use punch cards . Debugging was time consuming because you had to feed the cards to the reader, then wait until your job printed out (and it could take a while since student jobs were lowest priority) to see if it worked. Rinse and repeat until done. On an IBM 370 mainframe. For entertainment, one could play Empire on a DEC-20 at another state school over a scorching 300 baud dialup connection. The DEC featured a multiplayer game called Decwar, and one of the system admins pretty much could trounce all comers since he had a 1200 baud connection.
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OMFG that’s what it was called, Norton freaking Commander!!! Yeah, I remember that eye searing thing too!!! 