Word: modem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...carry audio programming was painful for home-computer users. For instance, Internet Talk Radio, based in Washington, has broadcast an interview show called Geek of the Week for two years, but home listeners have had to be patient: even using a high-speed, 14,400-bit-per-second modem, it took an average of two hours to download a 15-minute show...
...years, allowing him to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, bringing news from around the world. "But at what a price!" he writes. "Simply keeping track of this electronic neighborhood takes a couple of hours every night ... Bit by bit, my days dribble away, trickling out my modem...
...pack journalists racing from one trendy locale to the next and then turning back to sneer at the place they just left. Some of it comes from the I-told-you-so quarter, composed largely of reactionary fogies who flaunt the fact that they don't know a modem from a mousetrap. "The modern world is not dying for want of more information," Russell Baker harrumphed in a New York Times column last month, assailing, among other things, the word cyberspace itself ("... if you were given a choice of places to spend a month, which name would you select-Tuscany...
...noteworthy -- critiques are coming from a crop of new books written by people who have spent a few years (or in some cases a few decades) in cyberspace and know whereof they speak. One of them is Clifford Stoll-a gangly, wild-haired astronomer who got his first modem in 1971 and jacked it into the Internet's precursor, the Arpanet. His 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg, which told how he used the Net to trap some German hacker spies, was the first Internet-related best seller. How does he feel now about the place he helped popularize...
Commercial online services have been rushing to support the Web so that anyone with a computer and modem can take advantage of its features. Already, Prodigy has released a Web browser, and in the few months since that browser, and in the few months since that browser's release, several popular Web sites have suffered severe system crashes due to the flood of new users...