Readers of a certain age will for the rest of their lives be haunted by a specific string of bleeps, boops, fuzzes, and machine noises. It's a far cry from the buttery smooth connections we have grown used to today – but indeed our our first interfacing with the World Wide Web was through a dial-up connection that boasted blistering speeds of 56.6 kilobits per second if you used a specific modem.
Eventually, thanks to a rather special chip – known as the Amati Communications Overture ADSL Chip Set – we transcended. Gone was the age of torrid speeds and images that took an age to load up, and we ushered in a new age in which maximum speeds were almost 2,000 times faster to up to 100 megabits per second. This paved the way for a new kind of internet full of multimedia.
