PCIe 1.0 was 2003-ish [1] (I don't recall when the first motherboards actually shipped with them). Even in 2006, AOL had millions of dial up customers, particularly in rural areas without serious broadband options. Eventually they raised the prices on dial up to push anyone that they could to switch to their mediocre DSL service [2].
I recall a lot of even casual internet users finally accepting around that time that they should just transfer their email from AOL (to GMail if they knew someone to get an invite!) and get faster, cheaper "real internet".
But for a time, new PCs from folks like Gateway and so on had an option for PCIe modems, IIRC!
A lot of modern desktop computing (64-bit x86, SATA, PCIe, Wifi, death of Windows 9x, multicore CPUs) landed around the same time, and yes, dialup wasn't quite dead yet.
In a lot of ways, desktop computing hasn't changed much in the last 15 years. It changed way more between 1991 and 2006 than 2006 and 2021. Phones and tablets, now those are completely different.
>56k
Never occurred to me that I’d see those two terms together.