You could actually mute the modem's speaker with a command, which I did when I used my Amiga 500 to connect to the University of Helsinki dial-up service (for... er, research, and other academic stuff, obviously. Oh, all right! NetHack and IRC, and browsing USENET groups, mainly. It was UNIX.) 

No need for that noise while others were trying to sleep. It sometimes took a few tries to connect.

--

(raises hand)

I remember joining THE BYRNE WARD just as JB was returning to Marvel and his WONDER WOMAN run was ending, so that would be about '98. I never actually dialed up to AOL - I had joined after AOL introduced inbound accessibility from any other Internet connection*.

*Keep in mind that for the first few years AOL didn't even provide outbound access to the Internet, preferring to keep their customers within their walled garden. But they couldn't fight the trend for long, and the writing was on the wall for them once people caught on that they really didn't need AOL for much at all.

You could actually mute the modem's speaker with a command, which I did when I used my Amiga 500 to connect to the University of Helsinki dial-up service (for... er, research, and other academic stuff, obviously. Oh, all right! NetHack and IRC, and browsing USENET groups, mainly. It was UNIX.) 

No need for that noise while others were trying to sleep. It sometimes took a few tries to connect."

---

Damn, Aki, you're triggering multiple memories in one post.

ATM0!

Amiga!! They were not so popular in the US, but I owned an Amiga 3000 in college, got it just a year before their demise in 1992. But I got a lot of mileage out of it, used it until 1997, and at that point I had tweaked it with internet dialup capabilities and a rudimentary web browser. I even partitioned it and dual-booted NetBSD UNIX on it! Thanks to the old days of SCSI, I backed it up onto an Iomega Jaz drive and converted it into a drive image that I can still boot using a current Amiga emulator. It's wild still seeing files with timestamps from 1992!

USENET! That was my first real foray into the Internet, accessing rec.arts.comics.misc using dumb terminals on my college campus, and then ultimately from dialing up from said Amiga once I figured out how to tunnel the conection via Slirp. I'm glad that I was careful what I posted then, because little did I know then that they'd still be accessible decades later.

When I first discovered the AOL comic book boards, I was a bit amazed at having the opportunity to actually communicate directly with the comic book creators that entertained and inspired me. It's still cool to think that creators like JB give time to chat with us.