Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

That's exactly what it was.

According to monopoly regulation, the vast number of residential phone lines were intended to be subsidized by the lesser number of business lines from the beginning.

You could list your fax number if you wanted to but that was likely to get you more fax spam.

It was expected if you wanted people to have your fax number, you would do that the way you wanted to. Subway sandwiches always listed their fax number and put it in their ads, at noon there would be numerous people breezing through the line who had faxed in a Subway order form from the office. About the equivalent of ordering in advance from the app today.

I mainly faxed outgoing finished paperwork manually (that had been autoprinted by my 80's Exxon Intelligent Typewriters) or recieved confirmation of international orders that I already knew were coming [0] so when I got the internet I could basically tie up my fax line a lot without missing any incoming calls on the main number. When I was there after hours though, I could tie up both lines and I did that a lot to double my download speed. IIRC joining two modems in Windows became possible in W95 or W98 but I never actually did that.

Just used two PCs on two desks with one running the business ISP account and the other dialing-up to the home account.

Napstering in stereo screech :)

[0] My own company was the first marine place I worked where it didn't start out needing a Telex to serve as official cable confirmation of job orders. In the early 80's nobody had ever heard of fax machines because they were called telecopiers. Where you manually clamped a letter-size piece of thermal-sensitive paper onto a horizontal drum to receive a page. We had some of the better ones called Exxon Qyp where you talked to the other party using phones that were wired into the Qyp, then pushed the button to go into copier mode and it acted like an Edison phonograph cylinder where the sender ran its scanning head around the cylinder from top to bottom on their original document, simultaneously the reciever would run its thermal bit-printing head in the same pattern down their blank media page. As line speeds increased beyond 300bps, more modern machines became possible to send a page at a time, with digital memory no longer expensive as unobtainium, buffers came along. But it still wasn't good enough, you still needed a Telex until one day these documents finally became officially acceptable, as . . . wait for it . . . facsimilies.