Member-only story
The Robot Paradox
In 1996 I recall assembling by third router to connect to our fixed landline telephone service socket which had been tucked away under a small office nook in my home, built in 1920.
The 56.6kbps modem emitted a series of wonderful robotic sounding audio bytes that, had I been imbued with the foresight, then I would have recorded myself… but here is that sound.
To me it sounded like the world connecting with the universe, not just my machine connecting to the Internet network grid. I have great feelings of nostalgia for that formative time of learning how to code and build websites using HTML … and the constant frustrations of the line dropping and reconnecting.
At the time I was informed by a number of people that the lag speed (28.8 kbps was the standard range drop) and its zenith connection at 56.6 kbps would:
“…never likely increase as the latency is the copper conduction resistance and no more speed will be possible through the telephone connection port at your end.”
Well, fast forward to 2022 and I am achieving 50 Mbps through the very same…
