As far as I'm concerned, the downfall of little blinking lights on the hardware that showed you the status of what's inside, was the beginning of the making-shitty of the entire internet and computing world.
I started with an 1200 baud Commodore 1680, then upgraded to a SupraModem through a BBS sponsor program. USRobotics pioneered these, but other manufacturers followed suit on. Basically, if you ran a BBS and displayed a banner ad for the modem, you could buy it (the modem) at a pretty reasonable discount.
It worked really well for years, especially after the initial ROM upgrade (which came supplied not as a flashable update you could download, but as ROM chips that you had to physically swap out).
Supra, like USR, supplied upgrades as well, in the form of a motherboard swap.
I did always want a USR Courier; there was something to the big, black, red LED-lit badassery that was appealing to my teenage self, but the Supra had a little green matrix that told you the status of the session, which was really nice.
I was so excited when I got the 1200 because I could no longer easily read faster than the BBS output. I always wished I had a Hayes though, because back then the red LEDs were so damn cool. 🙂 😎
I always envied the Compuserve folks - the most "online" I got during my C64 days was QuantumLink (which would go on to become AOL) - Compuserve was real internet to me for a long time, but I was never a customer. More or less the same as I felt about Prodigy.
I couldn't find a picture, but my 2400 baud modern was a Prometheus, it was tan and had a slightly upward facing face. Designed for your phone to sit on top of it.
RJ11 clips into the back. There was a time when you had to plug in a handset but it was gone by the mid 80s, as a direct connection to the wall allowed for higher speeds than a hand fitted coupler could.