Tech breakthroughs

Dial-up modems, which opened the Internet to a vast audience and are still commonly found in medical offices, nominally create a 56k connection, although it is often closer to 44k and, depending on your line quality, 28k. With the prodigious amount of spam and viruses being circulated these days, it can often take 30 minutes or more just to download an e-mail, and if my colleagues have sent large picture files, it could take 45 minutes or more.