Modems: History

Dial-up Modems:

The history of the dial-up modem first started in the 1950s with the
need of the US military to be able to send data between air defense
bases that are placed throughout the United States and abroad. The
basic need was that the US military wanted a way for all military bases
to be able to linked to one another and that in case of an attack on the
USA whether by conventional bombs or nuclear weapons that these
bases could still be able to send data to one another even if all other
means of communication were destroyed. The idea was for these bases
to find a means of transmitting data over existing telephone wires or
what is know as the PSTN or public switched telephone network.
This military need led to the first commercial dial-up modem named the
Bell 103 being built in 1962 by AT&T. At the modems conception it
had a data rate speed of 300 baud. At first this speed rating of 300
baud was more the adequate or so the public thought at the time, since
basically what the 300 baud rating means is that 30 characters can be
transmitted every second which was about what a normal person could
type at that time.

Eventually it was realized that 300 baud was becoming too slow with
the inception of BBSs which were the start of and the building block
for what is known to us as the Internet today. BBSs were privately
owned bulletin boards hence the acrenem BBS and where a way for
those with dial-up modems and the know how to use them could find
groups of interests to them and post messages which allowed a
community of people throughout the US and the world to be able to
communiucate with one another on a regular basis. AS the BBSs grew
in popularity, users where finding was to upload programs and other
large files to these community boards and that 300 baud was no longer
being able to handle to download these large files without taking
enormous amounts of time to accomplish the task.

Eventually the Bell 212 was designed and it increased speed up to 1200
baud. As demand for higher rates of transfer by those using the dial-up
modem networks it became appranent that part of the problem was the
phone line system itself. At first the telephone line system was able to
handle the slower rates of speed without too much interference or loss
of data intriguity, but as the higher rates of transfer grew and the more
interference and data loss was being obtained this problem lead to an
invention known as the automatic data equalizer. The automatic data
equalizer dealt with the problem of data attentuation, attenuation
meaning a data's signal frequency in which it was being transmitted
over the phone lines. Attenuation was causing a problem of too many
data signals being sent at the same or near the same frequency as
others which lead to mass collisions of the data trying to be
transmitted. Propagation which is the weakening of a data signal over
the length that it had to travel over the phone lines to connect with the
modem on the other side of the transmittion. The automatic data
equalizer helped to solve these problems by better monitoring and
allocating certain frequencies to each data transmission to alleviate the
possibility of data collison and interference among all data signals
being sent over the telephone lines. The invention of the automatic data
equalizer meant that the data equalizers no longer had to be monitored
by individuals and collabrate constantly based on traffic that was
coming through that part of the phone network and this in turn lead to
higher transmission rates for dial-up modems and in turn the next
generation of a dial-up modems was born that was named the 14.4k
modem based on the speed that it could achieve.

Since then dial-up modems have been growing in transferring speeds
that went from then 28.8k introduced in 1994 and sortly there after
was the introduction of the 33.6k modem which has now lead to the
industry standard among dial-up modems which is called the 56k. As it
stands today the 56k modem has pushed the current limitations of the
telephone network for speed in transmitting among analog to digital
lines which has in part lead to the popularity of cable modems and dsl
lines of today.

*Evolution of the first dial-up modem which required the user to
physically place a phone receiver into the modem itself, just like the
one used in the movie War Games, to a modern modem that usually is
found inside the case of your computer and only requires a standard
RJ-45 phone line jack to be connected to its phone port.

Cable Modems:

Well, unlike DSL, cable Internet access doesn't have as extensive a
history. However, I can tell you that development has come along at a
very fast rate considering that cable TV has only been in out homes
and businesses a little over thirty years. At the same time cable Internet
access has made huge strives to perfect cable Internet access. In
1996cable Internet access was still in work. It wasn't until 1997 that
Internet access through cable would be sold commercially. Cable has
become the largest competitor to DSL in home and small business
Internet access.