I did a custom Google search from 1/1/2000 to 1/1/2005. Came up with this:
I love how it has a $199 introductory price for a "limited time only". It's probably been ~25 years at this point
Edit: Although the actual purchase link doesn't work. I wonder whether they'd give a discount if you emailed them today... or whether the message would just go into a black hole.
I love that site’s pin-stripe background. Even better, MegaPhone’s manual has a 1997 copyright and some screenshots in it are from System 7. Those were the days.
OP is asking about using a prehistoric modem to make phone calls on a PowerPC Mac. Having used a modem to connect to and run a BBS from 1985 to 1991 and again from 1999 to 2001 to connect to the internet (before the meteors hit Earth and wiped out the rest of the dinosaurs), I can attest to this prehistoric context.
If the 'new normal' is in reference to the internet, my 14 year old self (in 1985) would have done quite a lot to get the always on 24/7 connectivity I have now. To be able to just 'go' versus waiting until 9pm to use the modem, telling everyone in the house I was using the phone, opening a terminal program, manually dialing the number, waiting for a tone, then putting the phone down and hoping the modem picked up the connection would have made me very happy.
When was the last time you saw a Powerbook connecting to the internet via Dial-Up connection?
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Wonder Showzen was low-budget, crude, crass, and devoid of any sense of moral decency. It's style of humor was a harbinger some of the strange and dark humor found in internet dumpster fires like 4chan and newgrounds.On the former, I’m making a wry reference to 2001 and to a very specific reference found, briefly, in the short-lived, faux-children’s variety series, Wonder Showzen, from 2006–07.
The reference involves a brief scene with the number 11 (the episode’s “brought to you by” number) being “two better than the number 9” (the episode’s original “brought to you by” number) — until the foam talking puppet 11, after having this brief argument with the foam puppet 9, is struck by the airborne number 9. 11 crudely “burns down”. The main muppet-like character, witnessing the spectacle, says, “I hate the new normal.” The subtext runs way deeper.
Unfortunately, YT wiped all reference to it, but the episode — itself an intentional “bootleg” on the original, yay postmodernism — is still up, as a bootleg, on Dailymotion (just index to 1:45 and watch the next 30 seconds).
Just watch the clip. At this point, one sort of needs to have a certain lived memory — to be of a certain age, i.e., today’s dinosaurs — to appreciate the gallows humour of the mid-2000s moment in the clip.
