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Far be it from me to disparage the wonders of modern communication, especially the modem, one of the peace dividends from the Cold War.
Modem is an abbreviation for
modulator/demodulator,
and you need one to send data
through a regular telephone line. Computers communicate
with on/off signals. Regular phone lines carry voices,
actually tones.
Converting on/off signals into tones is modulation. Converting the tones into on/off signals at the other end is demoduation. Modulating happens in your mouth when you translate nervous impulses into speech, and in your ear when subtle changes in air pressure become nerve signals.
The story has it that the United States operated some radar stations in the remote Arctic. Data had to get from there to civilization, and the only medium was a regular telephone line, unsuited for the sort of special leased-line data communication of 40 years ago.
Some wizard invented the modem to send data through the telephone line. Thanks to this Cold War spin-off, I can write a column in Salida and, within seconds, it will be in the Post's computer, 150 miles away.
So far, so good. I've been doing that for nine years, starting with a 300-bps Volksmodem and evolving through a 2400-bps Everex to the 9600-bps Zoomodem which now slings bytes into the ether.
Coping with these has inspired second thoughts and more about this brave new world of E-mail.
I'm no technophobe and I'm familiar with serial communications. I can solder my own null-modem cables and get two disparate machines to communicate. I've written my own programs to handle such connections. I know that the BIOS INT 14H routines are slow and unreliable, that new 16550 UARTs work better than the cheap old 8250s, that COM1 and COM3 share an IRQ, etc.
Get the new modem, hang it in an empty slot. It tests fine. Time to send a column. All goes well, except my communications program, Qmodem, doesn't seem to know how to work with this modem when it's time to hang up the phone.
Exorbitant telephone bills loom. I try Comit, the software bundled with the modem. It brings up a menu when I type a slash, and sometimes I need to transmit a slash.
Try connecting to CompuServe. Mysterious garbage appears on the screen sometimes, no matter which program I'm using, and doesn't appear other times. Ditto for a bulletin board in Saguache, which fortunately is a local call.
Jeff Donlan, just named head librarian here, tells me about a new service through ACLIN, a remote-access Colorado card catalog. Set the terminal emulation to VT100, make the connection, see unreadable menus because some bytes aren't getting through.
Fight with it at different speeds, with different communication programs, for an hour, before giving up in dismay. If the problem was in software, why does it appear with different programs? If it's in hardware, why can I connect elsewhere without undue difficulty?
Finally connect to CompuServe, where someone is
perturbed because he posted a message a week ago, and I
haven't replied. Patiently I explain that everything is
long-distance from here, so I connect only on weekends when
the rates are cheap, and if he's in that big a hurry to
reach me, he can use snail mail.
That's the e-mail elite's condescending term for our Postal Service. I rather like the Postal Service. It's much easier to read a letter on paper and compose a thoughtful reply than it is to respond to bytes that have scrolled across your screen, with the meter ticking.
The return address is right there on paper. You don't have to decipher several dozen lines to divine how to get your response from your service to your correspondent's electronic address.
Posting a letter doesn't take any special skills. I don't have to remember which of dozens of commands and protocols are applicable to a specific respondent's service. I can focus instead on the content of the letter, not on whether I should use standard ASCII or 8-bit extended ASCII.
Further, the Postal Service doesn't charge me extra just because I live in Salida, whereas everybody else hits me with long-distance charges because they don't think we're worth serving with a local number.
And so, when I read the techno-prophets babbling about how wonderful the world will be soon when everybody is wired and we can pay our bills and file our taxes and communicate with our representatives, I have to wonder.
Who gets included in this new society? I have computers and some expertise, and I find these systems so vexing as to be almost impossible. What of the folks who don't own computers, or even telephones, or who devote their interests to nobler matters than data-compression protocols?
Well, there's snail-mail for them. Except that if the elite uses one communication system, that system will get the investment and attention, and the old system will atrophy. Look what happened to trains and buses, accessible to everybody and serving most hamlets, after the arrival of the jet, accessible to people of means and serving only cities and wealthy resorts.
This may explain why conservatives,
who
presumably adhere to the traditional, seem so enchanted by
e-mail. They want a society accessible only to the
well-connected.
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