Comment by fragmede

It's a practical position. The era of Winmodems was a long time ago, and the hardware was terrible compared to what we have now. Today, SDR is a fun thing anybody can pick up as a hobby. If it doesn't work, I have three other ways of accessing the Internet. If your winmodem didn't work, you didn't have a smartphone or a tablet to connect to ChatGPT (well, Altavista at the time) with and look for help. Then, when they did work, they were really bad because the single core CPUs of the day didn't have multiple cores to have the CPU cycles to run the software end of the modem and do anything else at the time. Which meant if you were running a game (Tuxracer, perhaps? Linmodem support wasn't broad, but it existed) at the same time, you lost. That tends to cause people to not like the product.