Newbie Guides New To PC's User Guide The Modem

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The Modem !

As was mentioned earlier, there is a "card" that can be plugged into the motherboard which has two phone jacks built into it. This is called a modem. And it allows two computers to talk with each other by sending digital electronic impulses through the phone lines. It is also possible to transfer the data in files digitally as well. This is called DOWNLOADING if you are getting the information from the remote computer and collecting it in a directory on your own computer; it is called UPLOADING if you are sending the information from a file in your upload directory to the download directory of the remote computer! The speed at which the transfers can take place is very varied from 56K baud to 528K and even higher than that. So, bps means bits per second or how many times per second switching off and on can occur thus transferring the information. These days the 56 Kbs baud rate is the standard, while many users have the 128K baud and quite a few are purchasing the 500K cable modems, which is a very fast rate of transmission. Running a remote program at 500K rate can almost seem as though the program was being run locally or not through the phone lines at all. The transfer is just about instantaneous. Most likely in the future the baud rates will be much higher than they are now to insure that remote programs ie. on servers, run as if they were being run on the host computer. This means that transfer time for downloading will be next to instantaneous as well. Just a note here on some terminology:1 byte = 8 contiguous bits of information 1000 bytes = kilobyte or K = 1024 bytes. 1000 Kilobytes = 1 megabyte or M = 1,048 kilobytes. You will hear terms like 120 MEG Hard Drive: that means the hard disk in the computer cabinet can hold approx. 120 Million characters of information, that's a lot of typing! Or, a file to be transferred has 145 K or 145 kilobytes. It takes about 10 minutes to download 100K at 2400 baud. So 145K would take about 14.5 minutes. At 14.4 K however it would only take 1 minute to download that same file! So who do I call with my modem? Well it depends on what you want to do! You could call an Interpersonal Computer Service like AOL. And for a relatively low monthly rate you could access a lot of information which includes the latest news, weather, sports, stock market quotes, shopping news, on-line banking and shopping and many clubs with bulletin boards where users from across the country call in and leave messages for one another! The graphics are very good and the colour is spectacular. A good investment in modem use! There is also E-mail.... where you can call and get messages left for you. Like your own answering service. You read the messages and then answer them and the answerees get the replies in their E-mail. E-mail means ELECTRONIC MAIL. There is also the BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM or BBS. This is a smaller edition of AOL...... the same types of stuff but much less sophisticated, but a great source of information. A bulletin board system has 5 major areas. A message centre, a files centre, a bulletin centre and a questionnaire centre and most have a doors centre where auxiliary programs are run which generally are games you can play on-line..... some of these have great graphics and are a lot of fun to play. BBS's are relatively easy to set up and in larger metropolitan areas there are a great number of them to choose from. Some are totally free, meaning there is no charge to use them. Some are partially free and partially subscriber. And some are totally pay boards. The rates are usually relatively low for the service and features you get for a year's time. Phone lines can cause some interference sometimes and the result is LINE NOISE or garbled symbols strewn at random on the screen. Sometimes if a great many symbols are thrown on the screen at one time it could mean that the connection itself was broken as when someone in your house picks up an extension phone...even for a second. This can be disastrous if you are downloading a file for example..... it can really screw up the transmission, and if you are in the middle of a big (amount of Mb) file you could really get a little angry! or a LOT angry!

The real moral of the story is GET A DEDICATED line for your modem use only ..... that is if you plan on spending a LOT of time on the modem .... It is unfair to ask your whole family to stay off the phone for hours at a time. Call waiting is NOT the answer to that either, for a call coming in on call waiting, not only will give you line noise, but may even throw you off the line completely ... called DROPPING CARRIER. Sysops (Operators of BBSs don't like it when you DROP CARRIER in the middle of a program! - could screw up his board! - then you'd really have a problem!) So DISCONNECT call waiting when calling out on a modem ..... there is a way to do that temporarily while you use the modem, and then have it come back on when you are finished. Just another word about the "speedy" modem. The actual transmission speed depends on what the remote (not your computer) computer can put out, not yours. If you have a 33.6K modem and the board you call only has a 28Kb you ain't gonna get more than 28K baud out of it! But if the board has a 56K baud rate modem and so do you, then you are in business ... you can upload and download and operate the program in general at a really high rate of speed. For a while 1200 baud was the standard, then it was 2400 baud a couple of years ago, now it is a 56K, and shortly it will be 128K, until the next generation of computer, then who knows!?

LOCKING: sometimes in modem use and sometimes not, you will run across a situation where the program LOCKS-UP...... which means that no more keyboard commands can be entered at all and the action on the screen has therefore ceased. This can happen for a number of reasons. Should this happen to you ... it is most likely NOT a crisis situation (if you have been saving your information every few minutes - you will only lose the data entered since the last save)..... the only way to "get the thing to "GO" again is to RESET it! That is hit the RESET BUTTON which will reboot the computer all over again! (Sometimes a warm boot will accomplish the same thing: that means hitting simultaneously the CTRL-ALT-DELETE keys. To get back to where you were before you would then need to restart the program you were in and open the file you were working on.

The Book Keeper

General Summary