David Hayward explores the world of dial-up this week
The ability to communicate with other computers over telephone lines has been around for an age, but it wasn’t really until the early 80s that it became more mainstream, in that people who weren’t university computer scientists had some knowledge of it.
After the film Wargames and with the advent of the 8-bit home computer, a modem was a luxury item that only the really serious computer user had in their collection. However, by the early to mid-90s, the humble modem had become as much an essential item in the personal computer’s arsenal as a keyboard, mouse and printer.
From 33.6K up to 56K modems, in the mid to late 90s, the sounds of the strangled budgie could be heard emanating from PC speakers across the world. Those with enough cash used ISDN, and if you were lucky enough to work in such an environment, you had access to a leased line. But it was the lower bandwidth modems that paved the way for the internet we know and love today.
Remember how we marvelled at those impressive web pages, how we could download early MP3s, and how the chat boards were alight with inane talk of who had the best cabling to get better signal quality? Imagine, then, taking someone who is used to broadband speeds nearing that of a LAN and placing them in front of a 33K modem. Would they have the patience to wait it out until the page had loaded? Like watching the ZX Spectrum version of The Hobbit loading its images in-game, the modem may have been slow compared to these days, but back then it was the window to another world.
Its History
Although the ability to send data over telephone lines has been around since the 1920s, a loose definition of a modem with news wire services, it wasn’t really until the late 40s and early 50s that the term ‘modulator demodulator’ was beginning to be used.
We can credit the US Air Force, apparently, for the invention of the true, modern meaning of a modem. It seems that the USAF SAGE Air Defence system needed a way in which to transmit radar images to various command centres around the world, and since the telephone backbone was already in place, the solution was to improve the technology either end of the line.
The first true modem was AT&T’s 101 model, a unit the size of a washing machine. That was quickly followed by the 103 model in 1962, which allowed full-duplex transmission and data speeds of up to 300bps.
As the technology improved, the Bell 212 was made available to companies outside of the forces and had incredible speeds of 1200bps. Eventually, as noise and echo cancellation technologies were introduced on phone lines and better error correction and filtering was implemented on the modems, the speeds grew in the 80s and 90s to 14.4K, 28.8K, 33.6K and finally 56K.
After that, the internet and technology surrounding communications had grown to such an extent that the poor modem had reached its limit.
The Good
A modem gave us access to BBSs, college, and university servers and network games of Doom with users across the country. It opened the eyes of the PC users and brought the world to our fingertips.
The Bad
By opening up the PC, it did bring in the potential for better virus outbreaks. And let’s not forget the more nefarious and unmentionable areas of the internet.
Did You Know?
• There are still over 40 million active modems, traditional dial-up, connection in the USA.
• Many universities still have a modem, dial-up backup to access their systems in case of a line outage.
• The modern Google front page can take over 15 seconds to load on a 56K modem.
• The biggest hack of all time, by Gary McKinnon hacking the US military computers looking for evidence of UFOs, was conducted with his trusty 56K modem.