Member-only story
Modems made simple
From the 1980’s through the late 1990’s, the dial up modem (modulator-demodulator) was used most.
Dial up internet wasn’t available for the general population until 1992. Once it was available the dial-up modem was the way to get connected to the internet.
What does a dial-up modem do?
The dial-up modem takes a digital signal from a computer. Then turns the digital signal into an analog audio signal. This conversion makes the telephone system able to use the signal.
How does a dial-up modem work?
The dial-up modem is plugged into an telephone jack (outlet) in the wall. Then plugged into your computer. With dial-up internet your data is sent through a dial-up modem through a telephone line.
It’s speeds were slow. The max speeds of the fastest dial-up modem was 56kbps (kilo bits per second) 56,000 bits or 7kB kilobytes. For perspective, this is the size of a really small text file (not a word document but a notepad .txt file). But you would never get these speeds in real life.
This is why text based apps like IRC and simple mainly text websites were the norm. Text is low data so the refreshes happened fast.
