Telephones were never made for the Net

Before the Internet came along, the world of computing was a very different place. There were far fewer computers and they worked mostly in isolation or in small networks known as LANs (local area networks). The Internet has increased the power of people's computers many times by allowing all these machines to talk to one another and exchange information via such things as e-mail and file sharing. You might wonder where the Internet came from; it seemed to take off virtually overnight. In fact, the vital piece of infrastructure on which the Net is built was already in place and had been invented back in the 1860s. I'm referring, of course, to the telephone system.

When Alexander Graham Bell and others pioneered telephones in the 19th century, their idea was to help people talk to one another over long distances in "real-time." Although telephone equipment was designed for carrying sounds, it gradually became obvious that the technology had many other uses. During the late 20th century, for example, many people started using a technology called fax (facsimile), which transmits printed documents between two electronic machines, one at either end of a telephone line. When computer networks began to take off in the 1970s, it was perfectly natural to use the telephone system to connect them together. But this created an immediate problem: computers exchange information (data) in a number-based form known as digital, whereas the telephone system had always been designed to handle rapidly changing sound waves or analog information. How could computers and telephones be made to understand each other?

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