For anyone who experienced it, the screeching hiss of a modem handshaking over copper phone wires is unforgettable. The technology may have tied up the family phone line, but modems were the gateways ...

This story is adapted from The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, by Kevin Driscoll. For more than two decades, dial-up bulletin board systems, or BBSs, were a primary form of popular ...

Kevin Driscoll’s new book The Modem World offers a picture of an early Internet defined by community, experimentation, and lack of privacy. (Fotoreport Quelle AG / AP Images) By signing up, you ...

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL's Instant Messenger introduced millions of people to the internet—and the idea that you were always online, even when you were "away." An Alternative History Of ...

Kevin Driscoll’s new book The Modem World offers a picture of an early Internet defined by community, experimentation, and lack of privacy. Where should a history of the Internet begin? If you asked ...