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It's fascinating; what we would consider an ancient piece of technology performs a wide variety of tricks to overcome the optimizations done by telephone networ
by jdiez17 14y ago
It's fascinating; what we would consider an ancient piece of technology performs a wide variety of tricks to overcome the optimizations done by telephone networks. I especially liked the part where they transmit data in order to measure the status of the phone line.
- wmf 14y agoThese modems are from 1999 or later, so not exactly ancient. Now I'm wondering if the limit to modem speeds in the 80s and 90s was encoding design or the cost of DSPs to implement more advanced encodings.
- Geee 14y agoI think it's mostly due to the fact that modems used just the audio bandwidth of the telephone line, which is about 3 kHz (by design). This limits the maximum speed, earlier versions probably had problems with transceiver complexity.
- zokier 14y ago> I especially liked the part where they transmit data in order to measure the status of the phone line. Afaik not-so-ancient ADSL does the same thing.
- charonn0 14y agoHere's a rather more ancient modem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE