This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If we've learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo and My Space,

it's that Internet darlings rise and fall and there's something darkly

fascinating about watching it happen in real time. Maybe we're seeing it now with

Twitter and Facebook. Some of us will mourn the loss of the communities

and connections that we've created in the virtual spaces owned by these

billion-dollar companies, while others of us will enjoy visiting the graves of these once unstoppable to tramp the dirt down.

Either way, the values and trends and hopes and ambitions that go into the architecture of the virtual

world say as much about us as the

architecture of the real world and that's what these two stories from 99pies past are all

about they are a couple of my absolute favorites. Enjoy.

If there's one sound that instantly transports me back in time, it's this one, the dial-up modem tone.

It reminds me of being in grad school in 1994.

I was talking to one of my thesis advisors about the World Wide Web and how much cool stuff was on there and how distracting it was and he recommended that I take the weekend to go through the whole thing and get it out of my system.

The internet was so new that a person with a PhD thought you could literally

finish it in one weekend.

For me, the dial-up tone reminds me of being a kid in the early 90s, when I thought the internet

was just that thing that my older tech savvy cousins logged on to to yell at strangers.

Now, it's that thing that everyone logs on to to yell at strangers.

That's millennial producer Vivian Lay.

It's weird to think about because I, along with probably the rest of you,

have been spending about 97% of my waking life on Slack or Twitter or Netflix or Google Docs,

...