The Dark Age

So it's the year 2000 and I'm living in a house where the 'phone lines give no more than 26Kbits modem service, and I'm attempting to make my living working as a remote working software engineer. The product I'm working on has a 1Gbyte build tree, makes a 50Mbyte compressed install image and often needs to be tested with hundred-megabyte databases. Things are not looking good...
For some reason the idea of renting an office in town, where at least 256Kbit DSL connections were available, didn't seem attractive. We were planning to start a family and so being around at home all day would be handy for a few years. The need to get up early in the morning to plow snow then drive on icy roads to town also didn't appeal.
I discovered that we had a six-pair phone cable at our place, and that the previous owner had three lines in use. We needed four lines already (two voice, one fax, one modem) but I wondered if it would be possible to bond two modem lines together and use a fifth phone line to double our 26Kbits speed.
These were the days when there were still real physical dial-up ISPs (today dial-up is all done by routing calls long distance to huge outsourced virtual modem banks) so I knocked on the door of the local ISP. The owner said they could provide two-line bonded service if I paid for two accounts, which I did. After the obligatory phone company screwup where they dropped all our lines instead of adding an extra one, we were upgraded to 50Kbits Internet service !