Everything about Telephony

These are really interesting facts about how the information and communication technology has evolved. Starting from Car-Sized mobile telephone to now slimmer than pencil width and shorter than palm,cellular phone, is something to really wonder about. Let's operate how it has evolved and what are the terms and technology used till date.

1. A soft modem is software that performs modem functions using the computer's CPU rather than in modem hardware.

2. A Yagi antenna, also known as a Yagi-Uda array or simply a Yagi, is a unidirectional antenna commonly used in communications when a frequency is above 10 MHz

3. Bluesnarfing is the theft of information from a wireless device through a Bluetooth connection.

4. Bluejacking is the practice of sending messages between mobile users using a Bluetooth wireless connection.

5. In computer jargon,'cocooning' is the act of hiding oneself from the normal social environment , which may be perceived as unfriendly or unwelcome.

6. Cloaking is the masking of the sender's name and address in an e-mail note or distribution.

7. Hacktivism is the act of hacking, or breaking into a computer system, for a politically or socially motivated purpose.

8. The popular phrase'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' was the first message sent between the Kremlin and the White house, when testing the hotline telex. That phrase contains each of the letters of the alphabet at least once.

9. Hayes Corp. produced the first modem that used the common AT command set.

10. Britain implemented its 999 emergency telephone system in 1937. The first 999 call reported a burglary; the burglar was apprehended.

11. The 911 emergency telephone system was developed by AT&T in the US as a public service.

12. Touch-tone service was first introduced commercially in the US in 1963, but took almost 10 years to gain widespread use.

13. On June 3, 1880, Bell transmitted the first wireless telephone message on his newly-invented 'photophone'. The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light.

14. Bell's photophone is recognised as the precursor of modern fibre optics, which today transport over eight percent of the world's telecommunications.

15. In 1970, a team of researchers at Corning Glass Works in New York made fibre optic communications a reality. Using fibre-optic wire which could carry 65000 times more information than copper wire.

16. Nearly all of the more than 25 million kilometre of fibre-optic wire installed in the US today is based on the first "optical Waveguide Fibres" designed by Corning Labs' Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and peter Schultz.

17. Digital modems developed from the need to transmit data for North American Air Defence during the 1950s.

18. The first commercial modem was AT&T's Bell 103, manufactured in 1962. It had full-duplex transmission, frequency-shift keying or FSK, and a speed of 300 bits per second or 300 bauds.

19. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed patents for the telephone within hours of each other. Bell got there first, and later won a legal battle against Gray.

20. The electric telegraph was born in 1830 when an American named Joseph Henry sent an electronic current over one mile of wire to which caused a bell to strike.

21. Though Samuel Morse gave a public demonstration of the Morse Code in 1838, the Congress funded $30000 to construct an experimental 40 mile telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, only five years later.

22. The message " what hath God wrought?" was the first official message sent in Morse Code on May 24, 1844 from the old supreme court chamber in Washington to Baltimore. The basic concept of cellular phones began in 1947, when researchers looked at crude mobile car phones and realized that by using small cells- range of service area- with frequency reuse they could increase the traffic capacity of mobile phones substantially. However at that time, the technology to do so was nonexitent.

23. Despite incredible demand, it took cellular phone service 37 years to become commercially available in the United States. Consumer demand quickly outstripped the 1982 system standards. By 1987, cellular telephone subscribers exceeded one million and the airways were crowded.

24. In the 1970s the very first cordless phones were introduced.

25. In 1986, the Federal Communications Commision or FCC granted the frequency range 47-49 MHz for cordless phones. In 1990, this became 900 MHz. In 1994, digital cordless phones, and in 1995, digital spread spectrum, were respectively introduced.

26. In 1998, the FCC granted the frequency range of 2.4 GHz for cordless phones. As of 2003, the upward range was 508 gigahertz.

27. A Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region was originally proposed at the APPCCIRN (Asia-Pacific Coordinating Committee for International Research Netwroking) meeting on 13 january 1993. It was the precursor of APNIC ( Asia Pacific Network Information Center). The 1st APNIC meeting was held at Cheraronkon University, Bangkok, Thailand, on January 16 and 17 1995.

28. On April 30, 1996, APNIC was registered in Seychelles as non-profit international organisation.

29. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), whose authority it is to manage the IP address space in use in North and South America, the Caribbean and sub-saharan Africa began operations on December 22, 1997.

30. In october 1998, the US government appointed a private organisation called Internet corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to verse the opening of the Domain Name Registration system to other completing companies.

31. The Domain Registry at the Information Sciences Institute for the University of the southern California administers the top-level domain 'us'.

32. ADSL, the most widely-used DSL standard in the US, can download at speeds between 1.5 and 9 Mbps, and can upload at speeds between 16 and 640Kbps.

33. 3G, short for "third generation", refers to wireless techonologies designed for high speed voice and data transmission. It promises performance that's hundreds fo times faster than today's technology.

34. The fastest type of internet connection is the T3 which can go up tp 44Mbps. Of course, they're used mostly by ISPs.

35. The first commercial modem was the Dataphone from AT&T, in 1960.