Internet history: when the modem played polka music

It’s easy to take the Internet for granted. I keep in touch with friends on Facebook and check random facts online the moment a question pops into my head. My generation may be among the last to remember what life was like before Google became a verb.

I began using email around 1980, and in 1983 a colleague in the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) launched the Public Relations and Marketing Forum on CompuServe (a predecessor of America Online). The forum, which included email and a chat room, eventually grew to more than 20,000 members.

At about the same time, information began moving online with services like Lexis, a legal database for lawyers, and Nexis, a database of news articles that immediately became popular among journalists and public relations people. None of this was interconnected: We had to rent a separate terminal to retrieve and print Nexis articles, and could not download them or share them on our own corporate network.

The promise of the Internet was exciting, even in those days, but technical limitations got in the way. Memory was limited, processors were poky and using a modem to send data over ordinary telephone lines was painfully slow. The draft of this blog post – a 120KB Microsoft Word document – would take 53 minutes to transmit with a 300 bps modem vs. a fraction of a second with the 50 Mbps cable broadband connection I have today.

So the online chat sessions I enjoyed on the CompuServe PR forum ran at a snail’s pace and encouraged multitasking. I would post a comment to the chat room and go downstairs to get a cup of coffee. When a response eventually appeared on my screen, I would type another comment and then read the newspaper for a while. It was what Citizen’s Band radio might have been like on Quaaludes. A telephone conference call would have been faster, but our commitment to the technology outweighed the inconvenience.

In the early 1990s, technical limitations meant that the desktop-publishing file for an employee newspaper I edited was too large to fit on a floppy disk. To work with an outside designer I would set up a modem connection to transmit the file, then get in my car and drive 45 minutes to arrive at the designer’s house about the time the file reached his computer.

Getting online with a modem involved listening to a series of squeaks and squawks until a fax-like scream indicated a successful connection. When I connected a modem to my first Macintosh in 1990, the modem kept emitting a faintly musical chirping and failed to connect. I wondered if it might be picking up a local ethnic radio station a half-mile from my house and turned on the radio to compare the sounds. Sure enough, my modem was receiving the Polish Hour. So I called the modem manufacturer’s help desk to complain that my modem was playing polka music. That’s never happened before, I was told. The solution was to wrap the modem’s phone cord in tinfoil. Honest. And it worked.

Online chat rooms and email listservs created a new kind of community, a precursor of today’s social media. In the Compuserve PR forum I got acquainted with my peers around the country, and about 20 of us met face-to-face for the first time at the 1984 PRSA national convention in Denver. In the 1990s several listservs for people who stutter gave me a multinational circle of friends who occasionally had “eyeball” sessions at the annual National Stuttering Association conference.

The Internet also changed the end product of my work. After a career of killing trees, most of my writing in the last decade has appeared online rather than on paper in the atoms-to-bits evolution that is beginning to dominate the economy. So I can no longer call myself an ink-stained wretch. One thing I like about publishing online is the ability to incorporate Internet links that amplify and clarify what I’m writing: something you can’t do with dead trees and a Linotype.

Best of all, the technical limitations I endured for years have practically disappeared. I no longer worry about filling up my computer’s hard drive or spend long minutes gazing at a whirling beachball on the screen. The Internet satisfies my news-junkie appetite for the latest information – unless I get distracted by cat videos.