Barnum once said " there's a sucker born every minute". https://quotepark.com/quotes/884772-pt-barnum-theres-a-sucker-born-every-minute/
now ? lololoolol, as opposed to when ? It was and always will be a scam . 99% of the people involved are crooks
It's hard to see innocent people (especially elderlies) get conned, but I cannot stress enough that the biggest stupidity is naivete. We live in an age where access to information is so readily available. Back in the 80s, it was a living hell to get information. People either didn't know or wouldn't tell you. Now, all you need is to get online and google it, and yet so many people neglect this and trust others to make up their decisions for them instead.
Dude, that was in the early 90s. Nobody knew what a modem (aka 56k dial-up) was until the Internet took off. In the 80s, which I'm talking about, we didn't even have a cellphone, let alone a modem. We were carrying a beeper/pager on our waist, for those who might still remember. 80s was like a dark age compared to what we have now. As such, nobody should relegate their power or decision to anyone else and get ripped off as a result.
Modems were there before the Internet. We got information through BBS networks. In the 80s. I was there. I know what you are trying to suggest, but it is disingenuous. Information was disseminated online before the "Internet". There was an "online" before the "Internet". The fact that you claim that the video is from the 1990s onward means you did not watch it. It also means you were not alive to experience those times. Yes?
I know that the modem was invented and used by the defense long before the 90s but it wasn't made available to the general public en masse until like 1994-ish. Unless you were one of the techies, I doubt you would have known what BBS even was back then. Most people didn't even have PC at that time. I'm in my damn 50s, so yeah, I'm only pretending.