The following article first appeared in the APril, 1993 issue of LOCUS: THE NEWSPAPER OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FIELD, which is fact a monthly magazine published by Charles Brown. Its editorial address is 34 Ridgewood Lane, Oakland, CA 94611. You may distribute the text of these articles freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Time, Space, and Modems Tom Maddox (tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us) When you get a fast modem, you change the nature of time and space on the net. More particularly, you make better use of the available bandwidth, which is to say, you can send and receive more information in a shorter period of time, with the consequence that cyberspace has become smaller, and what you find there has become more accessible to you. Thus you might think that the thing to do is run right out and buy a fast modem; however, getting a new modem of any kind is not as simple a matter as you might think. First, the notion of "fast" in this context is a relative one. For a major university connection on the Internet, fast means a T3 connection, which transfers data at 45 million bits/second, as opposed to a T1 connection, which runs at a mere 1.544 million bits/second. By contrast, the usual speed of a low-end consumer modem these days is 2400 bits/second, while the top-end consumer modem (what I am talking about as a fast modem) can transmit and receive at 14,400 bits/second. Until recently, such modems were expensive. They generally were priced around $750 (according to my own experience as validated by Bernard Aboba's The BMUG Guide to Bulletin Boards and Beyond). Now, however, they can be bought for half that, even less if you are willing to page through computer magazines and find the best mail- order deal, or if you can find a special purchase offer, perhaps through a user group or telecommunications provider. Also, for about $50 more than the plain modem, you can get a fax modem, which will both send and receive faxes in the form of computer files. Incoming faxes are saved as graphics images on your computer's hard drive, while outgoing faxes must be present on your computer, and the fax software will convert whatever sort of file you may have to the appropriate graphics image before sending it. In other words, you cannot stick a sheet of paper into the modem, nor will it give you one. However, you can send faxes to and receive faxes from ordinary fax machines. So far, so good. However, looking at modem reviews or advertisements, you are likely to be put off by an alphabet soup of "standards": MNP this and MNP that, V dot something and V dot something bis, cha cha cha. It is all fairly alarming and confusing, particularly since some advertisers confuse the issue further by posting inflated numbers concerning "throughput.". I will not attempt to explain even a small part of these intricacies both because I am not sure that I could and because my focus here is on a narrow range of modems, as described above. However, I will point the would-be modem purchaser to a couple of items in this alphabet soup. If you are interested in going online at 14,400 bits per second, you want a v.32bis modem. If you are content to remain at a mere 9600 bps, you can buy a plain old v.32 modem. (I will embroider these symbols below, but you can take these as a starting place.) Contemplating these matters and looking at my poky 2400 bps modem, I set off to cadge a high-speed modem--purely in the interests of science, I am sure you understand. So I called up the Supra Corporation and spoke softly and politely, filled out their reviewer's form, and faxed them copies of a previous column, and gave them a blood sample (that part is not true), after which they agreed to send me a modem for review. For those of you contemplating the probable venality of reviewers, I should add that I have to return the thing at some point or pay for it, alas. Possible questionable industry practices aside, I asked for the Supra modem because it is representative of the current state-of- the-art. I could also have called Zoom or Zyxel or one of the other companies currently marketing one of these things, but following an utterly random procedure, I found the Supra number first, and the Supra folks were quite cooperative. The Supra comes with the appropriate hardware handshake cable (you do not need to know what that is, but do know that you need one for these modems), Microphone telecommunications software, and FaxSTF fax software. It also includes a cute little screwdriver for taking apart the modem, a very easy thing to do, and installing new ROMs--not so easy but doable if you have to, which with luck you will not, and if you do not know what ROM stands for, forget it. In my experience, the Supra is a terrific little modem--though I will tell you later about the less than terrific experiences others have had with the same machine. And it is little: four inches wide, one inch high, and six inches deep. It has a power switch on the front, along with flashing lights and a little read-out that tell you the state of the connection and what the modem is doing with it. When the power is on but the modem is idle, the read-out says "OK," which I inanely find reassuring. Officially speaking, it is a V.32bis data modem, and it uses data compression standards MNP 2-5 and V.42bis. Note: if you buy a 14,400 bps modem, it should have all these features; if you are content with a 9600 bps modem (which can be found more cheaply), then you can settle for V.32 instead of V.32bis. Oh yes--and the fax transmission speed is 14,400 bps, though as we shall see, this is open to a certain flexibility. Setting the modem up was no harder than setting up any other modem. I made all the appropriate connections--phone line to modem, modem to computer, modem to phone--and started up the software I am used to rather than the rather weak-kneed version of Microphone that came with the Supra. (I use ZTerm, a shareware product available online for from David P. Alverson, 5635 Cross Creek Court, Mason, OH 45040, or from bulletin boards and ftp sites all across the country and around the world. The price is $30 if you download it yourself, $40 if you get it from Alverson.) Then I discovered that the Supra and ZTerm had a few problems, so I was having trouble making a high-speed connection to my Internet account. However, a text file included with the modem explained simply and explicitly how to make the Supra work with ZTerm (and several other programs); I followed the instructions, and all was well. I called up my account at Netcom and was connected at 14,400 bits/second. And that is as good and easy as it gets. My modem could connect at its highest speed to Netcom's modem, and none of the common gremlins intervened--the modems did not fail to recognize each other, and line noise did not knock the connection down to a slower speed. Also, when I began to download and upload files, everything went smoothly and at an effective rate roughly eight times faster than I had achieved with my 2400 bps modem (approximately 1600 characters per second with the Supra as opposed to approximately 200 characters per second with the old modem according to ZTerm, which figures things this way rather than by bits per second). Faxing proved a bit more difficult. Setting up the FaxSTF software required understanding and configuring three separate programs, and the whole business had a rather Rube Goldberg ambience. However, in defense of FaxSTF, I should say that I have since learned that it is widely named in the Macintosh groups on the Internet as the easiest to use of fax software available. Nonetheless, faxing is the Supra's primary weakness. Sometimes it simply will not connect with another fax machine, and then you must try again, sometimes more than once, before it makes a connection. Furthermore, it usually makes a 9600 bits/second or slower connection, not the 14,400 bits/second connection advertised. This problem is not uniquely or individually mine. In the Mac-Digest, an Internet clearinghouse for information about the Macintosh, there has been an ongoing exchange recently concerning just this modem. The most irate purchaser comments as follow: I own five Supra FaxModem V.32bis devices. Four are used on Macs, while one is used with an IBM PC-compatible. I have trouble with all of them! [. . .] The problems that I experience are quite simple. The Supra modems rarely connect in fax mode to another Supra V.32bis modem. They do connect to other brands of fax machines. [Note: this is the not the problem I have experienced; rather, it is almost the reverse. TM] My problem is not unique. If you read Supra's Tech Support board, you will find at least 100 messages complaining about this type of problem. Supra's moderator has his hands full! Unfortunately, Supra's only response to date has been to blame the problem on poor telephone lines (i.e., too much noise, low speed rating). Yet, another user says, I've had very good success with my modem sending to and receiving from FAX machines/modems all over the U.S, at least. I haven't tried anywhere overseas yet. And another, Yes, there are a lot of problems with different modems; I'm finding that a lot of them have to do with the phone lines the modems are connected to. [. . .] When my site's long-distance service changed, I couldn't connect to anything at any speed, nor could a coworker with a Hayes SmartModem 9600, or our Help Desk's Hayes SmartModem 2400! And another, Don't fault the modem unless you can better isolate things. It works fantastic for me In fact I have discovered that if I set the Supra's fax rate at a more modest 9600 bps (instead of its highest speed, 14,400 bps), it makes connections much more reliably. However, as always in these matters, you must decide what is important to you. To me, the fax capabilities of the modem are secondary: though I am glad to have them, I am much more concerned with the modem's data transmission capabilities, which have been uniformly excellent. In addition, you have to decide how much technical uncertainty and difficulty you can stand. I have fairly high tolerance for techno-goofiness of the "it will connect/it won't connect" variety, but some people simply cannot stand this sort of thing. At this point I hope you have thought about why anyone would go through the bother of spending more than $300, installing the hardware, configuring the software, and learning the new configuration's quirks and glitches. After all, users (by which I mean folks with personal computers on their desktops) have been moving along for the last few years at, generally, 2400 bps per second, and quite a few have 1200 bps modems, exactly twice as slow, and I suppose a few electronic survivalists even have 300 bps modems--though this last practice should properly be regarded as a species of cyber-masochism. So why put up with the expense and difficulty of a 9600 or 14,400 bps modem? Because even 2400 bps is slow. For instance, if you use a graphic interface on CompuServe or America Online or Prodigy, you will sit and watch the screen redraw as though it were a Glacial Electronic Etch-a- Sketch. And when you download files, you will find yourself on the one hand growing very impatient when that 400 kilobyte file seems to take forever to download and on the other simply bypassing interesting files because you know they will take hours to download. And if you are using a service that charges by the hour, or you are accessing the service by a long-distance connection, you will find yourself wincing as the numbers in the little download window just do not change as quickly as you would like. Finally, if you want to explore the Internet, where you are likely to find really big (and often mysterious files) ready for the taking, 2400 bps proves more than a constant irritant--it seriously hampers your ability to find and use what is out there. One example from the Internet shows how this works. At the Library of Congress an exhibit is in progress until April 30 of this year titled "Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture." According to the descriptive catalog, The Vatican Library is the prototypical modern research library of western culture. Surprisingly, its collections are not primarily theological. From its founding by Pope Nicholas V in the 1450s, the Vatican Library consciously pursued an acquisitions policy that focused upon the liberal arts and sciences. Consequently, the library has special strengths in unexpected areas, such as the history of the exact sciences, East Asian languages and literatures, and music history. Thus the exhibit includes notable and beautiful books and manuscripts from a wide variety of places and on extraordinary number of topics. A great many color images of items in the exhibit are available at the Library of Congress's Internet ftp server, whose Internet address is seq1.loc.gov (for an explanation of "ftp," see my previous column, "Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Life on the Internet, Part 2: Exploring the Datasphere," in the March, 1993 Locus). Just to see what the exhibit was all about, I downloaded about a dozen of them, chosen pretty much at random, which together total about one and a half megabytes, along with a series of supporting text files that total another couple of hundred kilobytes. The relevance here? The whole process took under twenty minutes. If I had done the same thing with a 2400 bps modem, it would have taken over two hours. More likely, I would have downloaded very few files, or none, as I would have been overwhelmed by the surfeit of choices and unwilling to have tied up the computer for the length of time necessary to get even a sampling of the images. These are lovely, high-quality color images (in what is known as JPEG format), rich enough in color and texture so that you can feel their antiquity. And the text files that accompanied them are clear, informative, and nicely edited for downloading. So in fact I regard that twenty minutes as well- spent. However, whether you are interested in the Vatican Library or its lovely books is of course beside the point. The point is that with a high-speed modem, the Internet becomes a more intimate and accessible place, and I can carry things home from it much more easily than before. Once again, though, as is so often the case with technology in practice, there are snakes in this electronic garden. In addition to the inherent difficulty of buying, setting up, and learning to use a high-speed modem, there is the ugly fact that the large conferencing systems currently put up barriers to the use of this relatively cheap and effective technology. Only Prodigy, oddly enough, which is generally considered the weakest technically of the big services, makes 9600 bps access available in a reasonable manner: they charge $2.00 per month in addition to their $14.95 standard rate. The 'WELL charges a $2.00 per hour extra for the faster access, and CompuServe and GEnie charge brutal premium rates of $18.50 and $18 an hour respectively, while America Online only has a weak promise that they may have 9600 bps access this year--they say they have not yet decided whether to charge a premium. (Given America Online's effective graphics interface, I believe they would be well- advised to give users the fastest and cheapest connections they can.) Finally, none of these services provides widespread 14,400 bps access. So if you are not careful, you can find yourself all hooked up with nowhere to go, except possibly bankrupt, and once you have experienced the quickness of a 14,400 bps connection, a 2400 bps connection to an already-slow system such as GEnie can become exquisitely frustrating. So I would advise you to do a little research on where and how you intend to use such a modem. For instance, in addition to the Internet, I also frequently call Planet BMUG, the Berkeley Mac Users' Group bbs, and they have plenty of 14,400 bps connections and a good graphic interface, and in both places I have grown addicted to the speed of the modem. For me, the Supra is worth it. Again, though, let me repeat one of the net's common adages: your mileage may vary. Like salespersons in many other industries, those flogging telecommunications services or modems will tell you what they think you want to hear in order to separate you from your cash--or in the words of a notable mother-in-law of my acquaintance, "They will pluck out your right eye and tell you that you look better without it." So here as elsewhere, be wary: caveat emptor, to say the least. But all this being said, my position on the Supra is that of an NRA member about his gun--you will have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers. (Supra modems are available from Supra Corporation, 7101 Supra Drive SW, Albany, OR 97321, 503-967-2410.) Correction: In my last column I referred to the abbreviation "FAQ," commonly used on the Internet, as meaning "Frequently Answered Questions." As a reader reminded me, it means "Frequently Asked Questions." I knew that. ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .