Other articles make more clear why that is.

cyberpress.org/windows-agere-modem-driver-0-day-f…

Rather than issuing a traditional patch for each vulnerability, Microsoft’s October cumulative update completely removes the ltmdm64.sys driver from affected systems.

As a result, all fax modem hardware relying on the Agere Modem driver will cease to function. While mail and messaging over IP have largely supplanted analog modems, some industrial and legacy applications still depend on fax modems.

Organizations must therefore audit their environments for any remaining modem dependencies and either migrate to supported alternatives or implement workarounds where available.

Microsoft’s advisory explicitly recommends that customers eliminate any reliance on the deprecated hardware to avoid service disruptions.

So maybe not all the way back to the original release, but back to the first release that included this specific telephony modem driver, ltmdm64.sys. If I recall correctly, Windows 3.1 brought networking capabilities.

However, another article claims it has only been shipped with every version of Windows since 2006.

thestack.technology/windows-users-hacked-due-to-l…

CVE-2025-24990 was credited to a security researcher going by the handle @shitsecure who told The Stack by DM “it’s a driver from 2006, never changed… I think it was historically shipped with everything, although that doesn’t make sense at all.”