Ohhhh right that reminded me of another anecdote: sound cancellation wasn't really a working tech back then so my Vent buddies hated hearing my game. I would have a little earbud in connected to Vent on my other computer so I could hear them, but they'd always hear my game, so I ended up developing this half-assed skill of speaking only during quiet times.
Like Discord but with like 10ms latency to your friends in the area and no fancy pancy filters adding group delay when you speak.
Overall a way superior experience to what we have today.
I remember having actual effortless conversations on Ventrilo. Nowadays speaking in Discord or MS Teams or what ever is exhausting since you interrupt each other due to the delay.
Phones have also gotten worse. It would be interesting to see a number of round trip "ping" for different Voip providers and phone systems ...
Vent aka. Ventrilo was a group voice chat application from about 20 years ago. You'd log into a server and have different "chat rooms" to be in, and it was voice-centric (and text to speech and many other features).
I haven't thought of Ventrilo/Teamspeak in years...