X-no-Archive:yes
Self-deprecating humor not withstanding, I find this stuff fascinating, and
had a good laugh at the self-deprecating humor.

I was just talking to our mainframe call folks about cruel tricks with punch
cards and 'remember when' (they do, I don't). I mentioned that a few of our
day-to-day workhorse technologies will be laughed at in a few years, that we
might see CDs go away in just a few years as the economies of scale favor
some form of DVD (just as monitors may give way to flat panel displays), and
how our vendor is now shipping us PCs with the 120MB diskettes as the only
removable r/w media. I'm not sure if they have DVD players instead of CD,
but wouldn't be at all surprised.

But my first shop was not quite so long ago, and on my say so, they bought
100 14.4 modems and seats on the latest version of their telecommunications
software, all costing more than they paid me in a year. While researching
these, I had the good fortune to read some articles that I will probably
never forget. This included one article speculating on what the limits are
to how fast modems could go, expecting the probable limit to be 24.4. It had
the perspective to discuss the 2400 baud limit. It then explained how 9600
was achieved. how the next expected speed would have been 19.2, and that
14.4 came as an unexpected solution. Not that long ago, the Media Lab's
Nicholas Negroponte wrote in Being Digital that the technology exists to
transmit 115 over normal phone wire. How these problems are understood and
then solved can be pretty amazing.

-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, May 14, 1999 4:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Re[2]: Punch Cards (Was latest technology)

Tracy's comments, because they're slightly wrong, offer me another prime
chance to come across as a pompous ass, going on at length about material
nobody probably wants to hear. However, that said, let me blunder ahead and
say the following:
<snip>