Word: cellular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Grodd appears happy with his choice as he sits at a brown metal table fidgeting with his cellular phone and excitedly talking about what the office will become...
...Merlin connects to the Net using Cellular Digital Packet Data (also known as CDPD, which is my favorite abbreviation to say, since it sounds like Seedy Petey). Unfortunately, Seedy Petey is not my favorite service to use. You can get it in most metropolitan areas from cellular carriers such as AT&T. But, unlike cellular-phone service, which is billed by the minute, you pay by the bit: it costs around $15 a month to send 500 MB of data; unlimited service is available for $54 a month. That would be reasonable if it always worked. But it doesn...
Seedy Petey sends data over constantly changing unused frequencies in the cellular network, a juggling act that succeeds when the user is at rest. Indeed, when I was sitting at my desk 23 floors above the streets of Manhattan, the connection was just fine: data moved easily to and from the Merlin, and even Web pages could be loaded within a reasonable amount of time. But when I was not at rest--when I was, in fact, hauling along on an eastbound train--two tin cans and a string would have made a tighter connection. I found...
...meantime, it doesn't take much to imagine how soon the rest of us will be untethered from our modem wires. Novatel is already talking about its next-generation modem, which will abandon Seedy Petey for gsm, a cellular standard that handles data far better--and faster. That GSM-compatible Merlin, which the company expects to start selling in the middle of next year, will supposedly send and receive data at Mercury-fast 144 kbps, even from a train. I bet it'll be cute...
...that?s almost beside the point. Has a cigarette-style war over America?s favorite new toy finally begun? "There is no evidence whatsoever that a wireless phone has ever caused ignition or explosion at a gas station anywhere in the world," scoffed Tom Wheeler, president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, in a written statement. But to DeWitt, that might as well have come from the CEO of Philip Morris. "We know these guys lie," he says. So judge the risks of connectivity yourself - keeping in mind that the cellular honchos issued the very same denial about the cancer...