Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem ...

Long before the vwip! of iMessage and the funky beats of the Skype startup song, digital communication had a strange soundtrack. Dial-up modems, which connected to servers and other computers via ...

Remember modems? No, not cable modems or DSL modems, which are more technically network bridges. I’m talking real, honest-to-goodness analog modems, the kind that actually made noise. The kind where, ...