They also made possible the career of Dennis Hayes, a computer hobbyist (“geek” is the term of art) who, in 1977, built the first modulator/demodulator (modem) designed and priced for consumers, the so-called Hayes Modem. He built, that is, the first consumer device that allowed personal computers to talk to each other, and with that you can spy the first causal relation between the federal deregulation of the 1970s and the birth of a mass Internet.6
