Word: optic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some Wall Street aerospace experts doubt that the satellite-launching business will live up to expectations. One reason: demand may be depressed somewhat by the new fiber-optic cable networks now under construction across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which can handle many transmission needs as well as satellites do. Demand for launches might be reduced further by a new satellite-placement technique introduced last year. A slight change in the way satellites are positioned with respect to the earth is expected to reduce substantially the fuel needed to keep them in the correct orbital slot. If so, new satellites...
...fiber-optic cable will be able to handle the equivalent of 40,000 simultaneous telephone conversations, more than twice the number of transatlantic phone lines now available on the three operating copper-core cables. Together with a $700 million transpacific fiber-optic cable scheduled to be completed in 1989, the new undersea phone lines should provide better connections and lower prices for millions of U.S. consumers and businesses who regularly reach out and touch someone across an ocean...
...often overcrowded and frequently suffer from static. And satellite connections, which now carry about 60% of transatlantic phone calls, typically produce an echoey sound and an annoying half-second delay because signals must be sent 22,300 miles up to a communications satellite and back down again. Fiber-optic technology, by contrast, delivers a comparatively pure sound. The ultrathin glass fibers in the cable carry information on laser beams of light, which travel with virtually no susceptibility to electronic interference. Long-distance telephone companies have already installed more than 20,000 miles of fiber- optic cables to connect major cities...
...miles of fiber-optic and coaxial cables run through the S.I.A.C. complex, which communicates with equally impressive banks of machines at major brokerage houses, as well as with tens of thousands of personal computers, passive desktop terminals, printers and other devices. S.I.A.C. relays information to at least 500 display terminals on the N.Y.S.E. trading floor alone. The exchange computers communicate in five different computer languages, manage almost 1,000 orders a second, and can handle a trading volume of 450 million shares daily, nearly twice the current record...
Telecomputing. Visions of sugar plums and fiber optic cables swirled through the Happy Hacker's head. In reality, however, telecommunications isn't very complicated. It simply involves hooking your computer up to a telephone. Usually you buy a modem ($100 to $250) and plug one end into your computer and the other end into a telephone outlet...