Kids these days have no idea..
That, and FidoNet! Nothing like a 12-year-old arguing his clearly superior opinions on a high latency global message board!
Fond fond memories.
Edit: also got my first functional Linux distro over dialup (Slackware). Floppies were expensive too, so I somehow figured out that I could download the A packages (core system), and a small subset of the N packages (networking) to floppies, and then bootstrap my way from there. Basically just grabbed PPP, the command-line FTP client, and Lynx, did the install, and then downloaded the X11 packages and Netscape from there.
Regarding the modems. My internal PCI 36.6 modem actually got me shorter latencies than using a 50k modem over serial bus. I have no idea why. But my 50k modem was at the very last years of modems. Many where getting ISDN and cable by then.
I remember in teen years phoning the local computer shop every week asking if they had the 16550 UART [1] serial cards in stock yet to upgrade my 486DX4-100 to get full 28.8kbps from my modem. Can't remember if they ever did.
I think the 16550 was faster largely because it had a larger buffer, so it wouldn't wait or drop data as often when the CPU was slow/busy.
I was not as early to the BBS scene as some of my friends, but I had to start at 300bps, even though my first model was rated for 1200.
There was a known issue with the serial port on the Apple //c I was using that I had to get fixed before I could even hit 1200.
In 1990, my roommate and I split for an HST so we could cut our long distance bills downloading Postscript fonts for our Macs at the time. This was before long distance got super cheap in Canada (we were calling a BBS in the US).
We were crazy obsessed with hoarding those fonts. Looking back, it was a ridiculous waste of time and money.