Computer Communications :: essays research papers

Computer CommunicationsCommunications. I could barely spell the word, much less comprehend its meaning.Yet when Mrs. Rubin make the announcement about the new club she was starting atthe junior high school, it triggered something in my mind.Two weeks later, during the last month of my eighth grade year, I figured it out.I was rummaging through the basement, and I ran across the tiny blue box thatmy dad had brought home from work a year earlier. Could this be a modem?I asked Mrs. Rubin about it the next day at school, and when she verified myexpectations, I became the first member of Teleport 2000, the save organizationin the city utilize to introducing students to the information highway.This was when 2400-baud was considered state-of-the-art, and telecommunicationswas still distant from all(prenominal)day life. But as I incessantly logged onto ClevelandFreenet that summer, sending e-mail and posting usenet news messages until myfingers bled, I began to notice the little things. Electronic mail addressesstarted popping up on business cards. Those otherwise-incomprehensible computermagazines that my dad brought home from work ran monthly stories oncommunications-program this, and Internet-system that. Cleveland FreenetsFreeport software began appearing on systems all over the world, in places asfar away as Finland and Germany - with free telnet accessI didnt live life as a linguistic rule twelve-year-old kid that summer. I sat in frontof the monitor twenty-four hours a day, eating my meals from a plate set next tothe keyboard, stopping only to sleep. When I went back to school in the fall, Iwas elected the first president of Teleport 2000, partially because I was theonly student in-the school with a freenet account, but mostly because myenthusiasm for this new, exciting world was contagious.Today, as the business world is becoming much aware of the advantages oftelecommunications, and the younger generation is becoming more aware of theopportunities, it i s successfully being integrated into all aspects of oursociety. Companies are organizing Local Area Networks and tapping intoinformation resources through internal networking and file sharing, and childrenof all ages are amused by the GUI-based commercial systems and amazed bythe worldwide system of gopher and search services. As a result, a million morepeople give way the net every month, according to a 1994 article by Vic Sussman inU.S. News & World Report.They say that the worldwide community used to double its knowledge every century.Right now, that rate has been reduced to seven years, and is constantlydecreasing. Ive learned more since I started traveling the information highway