Having started on Win 95 in 1998 (I couldn’t afford a Win98 computer) with dial up. I find this absolutely amazing.
I remember praying for 56K when you started the computer, but often getting 28K! Sudden sadness!!!
Oh, boy… You have missed joy of 2400 and 9600!
A popular question of those ancient times was: “Can you whistle at 2400?” BTW, I could 
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Yes I was late to computers, a real tech Luddite to begin with. NO I can’t whistle at all!
They brought a Win 3.1 computer to my work area because we were to far from the mainframe for a terminal. It wasn’t hooked to the Internet yet so the IT guy told us to play with it, we couldn’t hurt anything. I wanted to try to learn how save something but most of the folders had files so I was afraid to save anything in them. I found a nice clean folder with nothing in it and saved what I wanted there. The computer quit working, the OS had to be reinstalled. The IT guy said I saved over parts of the operating system, and I was no longer allowed to use the computer*(I learned about hidden files much later)* So it took me a while to warm up to computers.
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I started out in high school with an AT&T ASR 33 (automatic send and receive) teletype device with an acoustic coupler. You’d use a telephone, dial the number of a computer service, wait for the high pitch beep, then place the telephone receiver into the acoustic coupler; we didn’t even have a modem.
When I went to my university we had various connection devices, but quite a few of them initially involved acoustic couplers. We also had typewriters for punching cards; I had to go through both stages; things advanced rapidly after that.
At my first corporate job we had keyboards and terminals that were directly connected to mainframe computer systems. When they were working properly they were way faster than anything in high school or university, but there was a communications front end server, probably more than one, each connecting a group of facilities to the main server.
Direct access to the main server was actually fast, but performance dwindled considerably when multiple communications devices were splitting signals and sharing communications bandwidths with the servers.
One of our most creative projects, and though we didn’t invent it, we were early experimenters in creating true client/server environments with various models - personal computers instead of terminals connecting to mainframe systems, personal computers connecting to department systems, which then interacted with the servers, and we tried to find better solutions; the vendors themselves eventually built their own product lines with products and services.
All of that has probably been refined and reengineered dozens of times and probably a few since I retired eight years ago!
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