Just before the turn of the century, I was about to start college, and had just signed on to continue my summer job on a part-time basis as a contractor, answering tech support emails for an hour or two each day while I went to school.

To be able to work from home I bought my first PC, a Dell Dimension, and I signed up for the finest residential broadband that Pacific Bell had to offer. I was the first person in our neighborhood with broadband; I know this because they had to make repeated service calls to upgrade a mile worth of copper phone wires until they’d support a DSL connection, but after a month of that, the lights on the modem finally stayed green, and I officially entered the Internet Age, with such bounteous bandwidth that I was able to stream foreign films from CinemaNow in glorious 480p.