[0] " There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. "

Also: they're kind of overpriced in my opinion, but you can still buy USB based hardware modems, which would allow you to move this to a newer computer if needed, without having to worry about modem drivers.

The company that makes the machine is willing to upgrade to a fully wireless solution, but it would require a dedicated microwave link. That's actually cheaper than paying for the phone line, but "microwave link" is scary, and management won't approve it.