Earlier quoted context omitted.
The voice chat rooms reminds me exactly of this program called Ventrillo or “vent” as we used to call it back when I was in high school. I’m officially old! https://www.ventrilo.com/
okay oldie... when I was in high school if you wanted to talk to your friends while playing games with them you both needed a second phone line, so your 56k modems could use the other line to play Doom
At my high school, our CS lab had two Teletype terminals that were connected to a remote HP minicomputer over 110 baud (that's 10 chars/sec) acoustic couplers/modems. You had to dial the computer's number then put the handset into a foam-lined wooden box and close the lid. To upload a game, like Star Trek, we punched the game onto paper tape while not connected, then fed the paper tape back through once we got connected. Getting a connection could take 10-15 minutes of manually redialing after getting a busy signal because the service was so oversubscribed.
Our "high speed" terminal was a 300 baud (30 CPS) CRT.
These 3 terminals were shared by about 15 kids per class.