Tech Legacy - Dial-Up Modems (Part 24)

Beep... Grrrrr nghhh nghhhh nghaaaaa beep... That is the sound my old dial-up modem made when trying to connect. How could I forget that lovely obnoxious sound. It was worth it because after a sweet minute I'd be surfing the web through my glorious AOL ISP. Does any of this even ring a bell to you? Were you around for the age of the dial-up modem?

These days its all cable and fiber-optics but back in my day... The internet was slow... You had to wait. No instant gratification, good things including bits and bytes took time.

The dial-up modem was used everywhere until cable internet DSL and fiber optic connections became available to the masses.

Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line. The user's computer or router uses an attached modem to encode and decode information into and from audio frequency signals, respectively.

But when did it all start? When did the road to the information super-highway open?

In 1979, Tom Truscott and Steve Bellovin, graduate students for Duke University, created an early predecessor to dial-up Internet access called the USENET. The USENET was a UNIX based system that used a dial-up connection to transfer data through telephone modems.[1] Dial-up Internet has been around since the 1980s via public providers such as NSFNET-linked universities and was first offered commercially in July 1992 by Sprint.[2] Despite losing ground to broadband since the mid-2000s, dial-up is still used where other forms are not available or where the cost is too high, such as in some rural or remote areas.[3][4]

There you have it folks, it was 1992 and Sprint hit the scene. They changed the world providing information access to anyone who could afford it. It doesn't seem like all that long ago when I think back but technology has changed immensely and that is without doubt.

Do you have any stories to share about your dial-up modem or experiences with AOL? Leave em' below!

Source:

Wikipedia