That's one way of reducing your comms footprint
It's around 1980, and this software developer pilot fish is working in a large campus environment where the standard desktop equipment is a dumb terminal with a modem.
"Four-digit dialing would connect you to your choice of a hundred different minicomputer or mainframe modem pools," says fish. "Just 1200 bits per second, tops, but it worked well enough.
"That is, it worked well enough as long as the modem pools were well provisioned. Now and then, they'd have to expand a modem pool in a big hurry.
"One afternoon, after some arm-twisting at the vice-presidential level, our vendor delivered boxes and boxes of rack-mount modems for a weekend installation to support a project that was finally funded. They were stacked in a corner of the largest mainframe computer room, next to the comm racks.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here