What is a "modem"?

What is a "modem"?

Ethan Feerst and Dylan Stewart (Technology Therapist, Mac Guru) gives expert video advice on: What is a "search engine"?; What is the difference between "upload" and "download"?; What is "spam"? and more...

Modem stands for "modulator demodulator." Now, it's going to sound really silly when I describe what it does. But in the early days of the Internet, in order to create some method that computers in different locations could talk to each other, there was no infrastructure laid out, there was no broadband network that existed, and so computers had to call each other on the telephone. A modem, a modulator demodulator, would sit there and convert sounds to zeroes and ones, and zeroes and ones back into sounds. Thus all those whistles and bells and clicks that you hear whenever you dial a fax machine, or whenever a fax machine dials incorrectly and you pick up, what you're hearing is this old style modem technology where data is converted into sound and then back again from sound into data. Very inefficient, but it was the only option available for a long, long time, and still has applications here and there.