Not necessarily. For those who grew up with winmodems it was the reality. Fortunately where I grew up, dsl and more importantly coaxial broadband took off veey early on. Though there were dsl softmodems, these were rare. The difficult part was a windows logon software provided in isp cds. For macos users the isps usually sent IT guys with 'drivers' initially and for linux users they sent IT guys to help install windows. The 'dialing' program did nothing but few http requests but in those days packet capturing was not so easy.

A friend of mine 'hacked' the isp (weak telnet or ftp) to steal the debug version of said software to figure out the requests in logs. Unfortunately the local isp discovered the 'hack' somehow and found the 'proof' by seeing linux cds on their desk. Isp guys issued a pretty serious warning for their parents that the kid is becoming a hacker/criminal by using linux. This reminds of that famous text.