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Nice. Suse Linux was my first. But that came. Couple of years later. CD-ROM was already a thing by then.

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.

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Perhaps, like me, your serial port was driven by an older UART chip like an 8250 [0] which could be a bottleneck for modems faster than 9,600 baud.

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.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/8250_UART

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART

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