content: A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away... People would sometimes mistakenly give me their fax or MODEM number. I'd make various bings and boops into the phone in hopes that I was doing something, maybe printing an obscene fax. MODEM, caps... MOdulate and DEModulate. My first was an acoustic coupler at a whopping 300 baud (IIRC - this w  ffa  as a long time ago) and was colloquially known as a cradle MODEM. You took your Bell (all phones were pretty much the same) handset and placed it into the cradle. It happily would bing, boops, and chirp as it spoke to other computers. I have to assume I still have it in storage. A lot of stuff went into storage units when I moved here. At the time, I figured I'd go through them and clean them out and decide what to keep. I've had a decade and have gone from five storage units to three. Yes, I've been paying rental fees on them for over a decade. Yes, I know my shame. Thanks for the ping.  By the way, that's Lady Ada's site. She's pretty awesome. In ye olden days, she'd sometimes post nerdy questions and comments in some of the more technical minded newsgroups and on Slashdot. She's come a long ways and is a true geek. (There are indeed female geeks. Very, very few of them are attractive. I've never actually, to the best of my knowledge, seen Lady Ada. I can't speak for her attractiveness - but she is pretty geeky.)