These days POTS lines are usually only used for last mile communications so the calls get converted to VoIP on the telco side. Basically it's for backwards compatibility — the phone lines are already there, a lot of people have phone wiring in their houses and no configuration is required on the consumer's end.
In general the days of having direct electrical connections between two distant telephones are long gone. The telco companies scrapped it when they realized that they could trunk the phone calls from a local branch to the central office using PCM streams over a single cable.
This is a terminal emulator within vim. I believe that they meant that a terminal emulator for Vim would be required so that it could handle ANSI escape codes, etc. This is something that a VGA graphics card couldn't handle on its own.
For some reason, I just can't remember things for life.
Despite being fairly experienced and having a rather solid grasp of Python/Go/JS/etc I still have to look up basic things like file modes (with bash syntax being especially notorious for being forgettable to me).
What I'm good at, however, is keeping references in my head, i.e. I know precisely what to Google to get the exact answer that I want. This way I compensate for my bad memory.
And for the record, I'm in my 20s. Sometimes I worry if it's going to take a toll on my career in the long run but so far it hasn't been much of a problem (apart from being a source of insecurities).
This is a very good example of how you can save yourself the mental hurdle of remembering how to configure something etc.
I can only suspect how much time, trial and error this must've taken. This is my main issue with IaC. The concept really lends itself to any kind of modern infra, however I'm really put off by the sheer amount of time it takes me to whip out a bunch of Ansible playbooks and helper scripts, and on top of that make sure that all of them are idempotent.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong and this should be easy?