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FROM THE SHOP - DIARY 3/19/99
I have left the Internet bronze age: the
age of the 56K MODEM. To be more exact, I have really left half of
it behind. A few days ago New England Cablevision installed a cable
drop from the telephone pole outside of my store to my desk next to my shop. I
installed a General Instrument SURFboard 1000 Internal cable MODEM
and started surfing in turbo via the New England Cablevision/Great Works
Internet Speedway system. (Speedway techs will normally install the
MODEM on site for new Speedway customers).
By halfway I mean the cable MODEM receives
from the Internet, but my dial-up, 56K MODEM is still required to send to
the Internet. The cable system here, like many, is still one-way. There
are plans to complete an upgrade to the cable TV infrastructure for two-way
communications and digital TV in the near future. For now, I'll say
half way is long way--more like, SUPER!
Other than having to dial-up--which will be
eliminated when the system goes duplex (two-way)--and a shortage of available
interrupts in my computer, sending data uphill is no big deal, except when
uploading files (e.g., uploading my web sites). When you are
sending to the Internet you are mainly sending a small amount of data at
a low rate: keystrokes, etc. The cable MODEM is where you need it the
most: receiving large amounts of data. Unless there is a choke point
(e.g., an overloaded server) somewhere else on the Internet, Web pages appear
to load almost as fast as browsing them locally from your hard disk. Large
graphics appear almost instantly.
Where Speedway really shows its stuff is in
file downloads --something I do a lot of in my shop. For example, I
just downloaded a 3 MB file from download.com at 46 Kbytes/sec in 46
seconds! Or, almost 10 times faster than my 56K MODEM, which usually
connects at about 49Kbits/sec and downloads at about 4+ KBytes/sec. (one
byte = 8+ bits) on a good day. And a very long way from my first Internet
(called the Arpanet in those days) connection--the Internet stone age--which
was a 300 BUAD (~300 bits/sec; 0.3 KBits/sec.) lease line from Stuttgart,
Germany to the University College, London.
I would be more than happy to demo Speedway
to anyone in my area who is interested. Just drop
by my store in Sanford, Maine, U.S.A.
IE 5.0. Yesterday, MicroSoft
released version 5.0 of their popular Internet Explorer browser, etc. software.
Release 5.0 is not a major release like 4.0, but it is certainly worth having. I
have been using the Beta release of 5.0 for a couple of months now and I
like it. It is faster than 4.0 and has some useful new features. You
can download a copy at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/download/default.htm
But, wait awhile. I wanted to
download the upgrade as test of the cable MODEM... many MBytes of stuff. I've
tried to get it for last couple of days now and it's been impossible. Yesterday,
there were 75,000 users trying to download it from the Conxion server I tried
and connection speeds were in the hundreds of bytes/sec. A cable MODEM
can't make a slow server fast. Back to work...
Larry
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