My coworker complained that his computer was too slow.

This joke gets its laughs from a delightful blend of exaggeration and relatable historical context. The humor stems from the dramatic contrast (Review) between what a modern office worker considers "slow" and the truly glacial pace of internet access from a bygone era. The punchline takes the common idiom of "holding your breath" in anticipation and stretches it to an absurd, literal extreme, perfectly capturing the agonizing wait times that were once the norm for getting online.

For anyone who experienced the internet before broadband, dial-up is a potent symbol of digital patience. Connecting to the internet meant listening to a cacophony of screeching modem sounds, followed by minutes, not seconds, for a simple webpage to load. The idea of holding your breath for a modern "slow" computer pales in comparison to the patience required for a dial-up connection, where waiting for an image to render line by agonizing line was a common experience. The joke playfully reminds us how far technology has come, making us chuckle at both the coworker's complaint and the vivid memory of dial-up's sluggish reality.