{"id":6603,"date":"2014-10-13T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2014-10-13T07:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=6603"},"modified":"2014-10-11T09:30:05","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T16:30:05","slug":"adios-dial-up-modem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=6603","title":{"rendered":"Adios, Dial-Up Modem"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sun is about to set on the dial-up modem, once the most common way to access the Internet. According to Pew Research<\/a>, fewer than 3 percent of Internet users have a dial-up modem. An era has passed.
\n
\nOh, I remember my first modem, shown in Figure 1 and written about in this post<\/a> from 2009. I used that modem in 1984. It ran at 300 baud. Speed-wise that meant that text appeared on the screen about as fast as you could type it. In other words: S-L-O-W-L-Y.<\/p>\n

\"My

My very first modem.<\/p><\/div>\n

That slow modem speed was okay, considering how new digital communications was, that the technology used standard phone lines, and also that text was about all you transmitted from one computer to another. Sure, you could download programs, but the programs were small back then. You didn’t mind waiting three hours to download a 200K program file.<\/p>\n

I skipped the 1200 BPS revolution and purchased a new 2400 BPS modem. Then I was one of the first kids on the block to get a 9600 BPS modem. They just burned up the phone lines.<\/p>\n

BPS = Bits Per Second, the modem’s speed. Broadband speed is measured in the millions<\/em> of BPS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From 9600 BPS the online world moved to the 14.4 KBPS modems. They were popular for a long time, but eventually supplanted by 28.8 KBPS modems.<\/p>\n

The pinnacle of dial-up technology was the 56 KBPS modem, which was about as fast as standard phone lines could handle. I used 56K modems in my old office 14 years ago. That’s because faster service wasn’t available out in the sticks where I lived.<\/p>\n

Yet over the past several years, the migration to high-speed, broadband, on-all-the-time Internet has pretty much been successful. Even in remote areas, mobile data signals are now available. You can latch on to a 4G LTE signal in your cabin in the woods, which is what most people do.<\/p>\n

I assume the 3 percent still using dial-up just don’t have other options, or perhaps they don’t like change. As the world moves away from landline phones, I expect that number to drop further.<\/p>\n

For my career, this new data means that the next release of my books — specifically Laptops For Dummies<\/em> and PCs For Dummies<\/em> — won’t cover dial-up Internet access. That’s pretty much the way it goes. I don’t cover monochrome PC monitors or floppy disks any more either.<\/p>\n

Technology moves forward!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s just no longer an option.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16,15],"class_list":["post-6603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-laptop","tag-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6603"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6673,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6603\/revisions\/6673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}