A Brief History of Modems

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.

Re:Acoustic coupler era and POTS!

[mother_reincarnated]

Sadly, your comment contains more actual information, and is better written, than the 'article.'

Written by someone born in the 90s?

[sleeper0]

Otherwise how could you think that v.32bis (14.4k) was introduced in 1980? I had to look it up to see what the hell they were on about, apparently the 1980 figure comes from a break through channel coding paper written in 1980 at IBM that didn't even get passed around for a few years. The reality is that the public had to wait nearly a decade before those techniques were out of the lab, and a few more years before a standard was ratified. Trying to figure out what niche this article fills - the wiki article on modems [wikipedia.org] does a far better job at going over the same info. Hell, the author of TFA even put an old-time(tm) bw filter on a photo from the late 80s trying to make it seem like a shot with a laptop came from the 60s.

Oh, for the "good old days"

[ihuntrocks]

A few friends and I were talking about our days on dialup when we were growing up. One friend was commenting on not noticing the download time on a 5 meg file, and how he complains when his download speeds are 500 k per second now. We had a little fun recalling our top-out speeds of 4.6 k per second, and the magical "1 meg every six minutes" rate we had all calculated growing up.

We all agreed that in a way, it is almost a shame that kids today are growing up with remarkably better technology than we had at their age (and it hasn't been that long ago that we were their age). We all sort of miss dealing with cobbled together and salvaged parts, trying to eek out any performance we could from our machines. One of the friends present recalled helping me overclock my 33 mhz machine to 36 mhz (woohooo! A 10% gain) and how excited we were.

These days, my cell phone has more computing power than the first three computers that I owned, and a much faster data transfer rate. The old technology still amuses me though.

Re:As a child of the 80s...

[jamesh]

I was using dialup as little as 5 years ago. I was too far from the exchange for ADSL and ISDN was too expensive. Then Telstra introduced a plan where you paid about $100/month for BRI ISDN, giving you 2 64K channels. So I could be surfing at 128K unless someone wanted to use the phone in which case it would drop back to 64K. Better than my 33K modem! I assume Telstra did that to get one last little bit of life out of the ISDN infrastructure that nobody wanted anymore. They took that option away a few years ago, but fortunately I'm on ADSL now.

My mum was using dialup as little as 12 months ago, until she got her two-way satellite connection. I find that the quality of modems these days is pretty awful. The people in Australia who use them typically use them because they are too far away from the exchange to get anything else, which means the signals are travelling over copper that could be decades old. You need a good modem which can adjust its impedance settings and keep tuning to the line characteristics for that to work at reasonable speeds.

Re:Baud vs bps

[aberkvam]

]P.S. 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....

Generally when an acronym is pronounced as a single word and has entered general usage, it is not capitalized. These days scuba, laser, and radar are not capitalized. Nor is modem.

No mention of the Hayes VS. Telebit 14.4K wars??

[bADlOGIN]

Back in the early '90 the whole HST vs V32.bis was a big deal for a couple of years. It's a bit sad to not see this mentioned in terms of the impact to the PC modem world...

Parkinson's Law

[michaelmalak]

To grab a bit of perspective on the actual speed of these modems, consider that a letter consists of eight bits. A speed of 300 bits meant that this modem could only send out around 30 letters a second.

While one might think things have improved by four orders of magnitude (10,000x), thanks to Parkinson's Law, they have only improved by two orders (100x). Navigating to the washingtonpost.com home page takes 7 seconds to load on my 2.5-year old 2GHz desktop with Firefox. CTRL-A and CTRL-C then paste into Notepad yields a 15K text file. 15 * 1024 * 10 bits / 7 seconds = 19.2K.

Hey, it's like I'm back running my 1992 BBS.