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If, like me, anyone grew up in the '90s and early '00s trying to download a playlist, or heaven forbid, a "Dragon Ball Z" episode from Japan because I was sick of seeing Frieza Saga reruns on Toonami (the struggle was real), you'll know what a slow internet connection really is. While the sound of my modem card dialing up and connecting to the World Wide Web fills me with warmth and nostalgia, watching images load line-by-line and hoping the download of "Unreal Tournament" didn't crash during the night isn't something I'd like to go through again.

What is the download speed of a 56k modem? The clue's in the name, limited to transmitting 56 kilobits per second, or just 7 kilobytes per second, since there are eight bits in every byte, the unit we measure files with today. Considering downloading a 100MB file back then? We would have to wait four hours to finish downloading providing that the connection was actually performing at 56 kilobits per second.…