Word: modem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...began innocently enough: I was stuck at home, recovering from back surgery, and needed some diversion. Bored with channel surfing and unable yet to return to running, I borrowed a PC from the office, hooked up a modem and began to check out the local computer bulletin board (BBS) scene...
...nonpayment -- because I wasn't off-line enough to open the bills. My work and financial records moved to a corner of the living room as I reassigned home-office space; after all, a brand-new 386- model PC, color monitor, fast dot-matrix printer and 2400 bps modem deserved their own desk and room. Visits to local computer supermarkets became more frequent than trips to neighborhood bookstores. Relatives and friends complained about busy signals and demanded that I get home voice-mail service...
...sure I won't be that far away from cyberspace. I still have to finish tuning up my brand-new Pentium 90 speedster with the 2-gigabyte SCSI drive, 32 megs of screaming RAM, a 17-in., 16.7 million color screen, 4x CD-ROM drive, V.34 superdata highway modem. But before taking it out for a spin...
Technologies ranging from the telegraph to the telephone, from typewriter to carbon paper have all made mass organization easier and cheaper. And since the 1960s, the technologies have unfolded relentlessly: computerized mass mailing, the personal computer and printer, the fax, the modem and increasingly supple software for keeping tabs on members or prospective members. The number of associations, both political and apolitical, has grown in lockstep with these advances. One bellwether -- the size of the American Society of Association Executives -- went from 2,000 in 1965 to 20,000 in 1990. As for sheerly political organizations: no one knows exactly...
Already the spontaneous formation of a single-issue interest group has been seen on the Net. In 1993 the Federal Government announced plans to promote the Clipper chip, which would have ensured the government's ability to decipher / messages sent over phone lines by modem. The circulation of an anti-Clipper petition turned into a kind of impromptu online civil-liberties demonstration, boosting the number of signatures from...