This is 99% invisible.

I am Roman Mars.

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 probably the rest of you have been spending about 97% of my waking life on

Slack or Twitter or Netflix or Google Docs, but I'm just old enough to remember a time before the internet was a requirement to participate in society.

A time before it was everywhere.

It was this new thing that you heard about.

I first heard about the internet.

This is David Bonnet.

I was reading a magazine, I think,

PC World or something like that and I just thought oh this just sounds

amazing. Today David's a philanthropist and tech entrepreneur but back in the early 1990s he really wanted to do something great

with this thing called the World Wide Web because the way he saw it it was about to change the world for the better.

David and his business partner a guy named John Reznor,

...