A Brief History of Modems 249
Posted
by
timothy
from the old-familar-cacaphony dept.
from the old-familar-cacaphony dept.
Ant points out this two-page TechRadar article about the history of modems; the photographs of some behemoth old modems might give you new respect for just how much is packed into modern wireless devices.
Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Acoustic coupler era and POTS! (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, your comment contains more actual information, and is better written, than the 'article.'
You read the articles?
Re:Acoustic coupler era and POTS! (Score:5, Funny)
ahh sh*t, busted.
Re:Acoustic coupler era and POTS! (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, your comment contains more actual information, and is better written, than the 'article.'
You read the articles?
Only in Playboy
Re:As a child of the 80s... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, smart. My solution was to just bellow really loudly that everyone should stay off the phone so I could use the modem. This was usually followed by my parents telling me to use the intercom instead of yelling, or telling me to stop tying up the phones, or asking if I'd done my homework yet.
You also couldn't tie up the phone for hours on end. There was very very few people that had an answering service
No way man. The call-waiting thing was, to me, a feature. It meant that I could assure my parents that I wouldn't be tying up the phone lines and preventing people from calling. It was an enormous hassle when the thing disconnected but it meant my parents couldn't use that as an excuse to tell me not to use it.
When I was 14 or so my parents felt comfortable enough to leave me home alone for four days when they went out of town. Still, they asked my uncle to check up on me periodically. Of course, since I didn't care about missing calls, I fired up the modem, logged on, and kept the call-waiting disabled. This meant that my uncle got a busy signal for a day and a half when he was trying to call to see how I was doing, until he finally drove over to see if I was just tying up the line with the modem, or if I was dead on the floor after a brutal break-in that knocked the phone off the hook.
Pointless nostalgia now concluded. More pointless nostalgia on this topic may be found here [mirrorshades.org] if anyone's interested.
Re:Baud vs bps (Score:5, Funny)
The word MODEM (as the article indicates) represents MOdulatorDEModulator. Hence it should be capitalized. This is also try of enCOderDECoder (CODEC). Slightly less related yet as correct LASER and RADAR....
Okay, okay, fair point, but ...
People were tying up VOICE channels
Come on, that one you just made up.
Re:My Modem Story (Score:4, Funny)
A computer-room technician once saw me whistling modem sounds into the phone and running back and forth. I later told him why, and he told me I was nuts and mumbled something about whistling sweat nothings to my robotic girlfriends.
That sounds like a great start to a new sig.
Re:Let me be the first to say (Score:3, Funny)