Word: modem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...greatest advantage of the modem, then, is that it allows the transfer of data over ordinary phone lines, at no extra cost, barring the necessary hardware and software and paying for each phone call. The same advantage lies behind the popularization of fax technology, which allows documents to be transfered directly into hard copies...
...word "modem" was coined to spare the everyday user from having to refer to the device's more descriptive but longer name: modulator/ demodulator.Simply put, a modem takes analogsignals coming in over the phone line and converts them to digital 0's and 1's your computer can understand, and vice versa. Like the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) in your compact disc player, the modem is a link between the analog and digital worlds...
...mail across the country, by contrast, you have to know not only the recipient's number (or E- mail "address") but also what system he subscribes to (MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, CompuServe, Prodigy, Internet, etc.). To receive a message, you have to hook your computer to a modem, start a communications program, dial into the remote computer where your mail is stored and download the message into your computer...
When Ross Perot began his presidential campaign last year, he promised to use technology as an engine of radical democratization. The citizens of the Texas billionane's cybersepublic Would communicate their opinions to the president via PC and modem. The case with which bailots could be case and counted would render representative government in its present form obsolute and the Washington power slite would wither perot's plan would transform the landscape of American politics...
...CYBERSPACE IS MORE THAN A PLAYGROUND for hacker high jinks. What cyberpunks have known for some time -- and what 17.5 million modem-equipped computer users around the world have discovered -- is that cyberspace is also a new medium. Every night on Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie and thousands of smaller computer bulletin boards, people by the hundreds of thousands are logging on to a great computer-mediated gabfest, an interactive debate that allows them to leap over barriers of time, place, sex and social status. Computer networks make it easy to reach out and touch strangers who share a particular obsession...