It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.” You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).

Then you load up Internet Explorer, AOL’s default Web browser. Now what? There’s no YouTube, Digg, Huffington Post, or Gawker. There’s no Google (GOOG), Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate. But these sites aren’t very big, and they don’t hold your interest for long. People still refer to the new medium by its full name—the World Wide Web—and although you sometimes find interesting stuff here, you’re constantly struck by how little there is to do. You rarely linger on the Web; your computer takes about 30 seconds to load each page, and, hey, you’re paying for the Internet by the hour. Plus, you’re tying up the phone line. Ten minutes after you log in, you shut down your modem. You’ve got other things to do—after all, a new episode of “Seinfeld” is on.

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$61 million (market cap) broadband modem-maker Westell Technologies (WSTL) this evening reported that since July 28, the company has purchased 963,481 of its shares on the open market, about 2 percent of its float of 41.8 million shares. The company also said its interim CEO, Bernard Sergesketter, purchased 100,000 shares on his own in that period. That was an additional 40,000 shares on top of the 60,000 the company announced Aug. 12 that Sergesketter had already purchased.

Wonder if someone knew something? The shares were up almost 5 percent today at 86 cents prior to tonight’s release.

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