Having a modem expands your reach. Making it work means being able to get online, or connected to some other computer and being able to do what you want to, finding what you need and then hanging up or logging off. In short, it is a bridge or gateway to a brave new world.

Alright, let me stop sounding evangelical and get down to something more meaningful. Modem is an acronym for modulator demodulator. It converts the computer signal to a format capable of being handled by POTS (plain old telephone system) and vice-versa. There are two parts to using a modem the modem per se and the software to drive it.

Similarly, to use the modem you use some communication programme like Bitcom or Procomm plus. Even your Windows software has a communication programme. A term closely associated with modems is `baud' or `bps'. It describes the speed at which the modem transfers data to and fro.

Machines need to talk to each other easily in order to better serve people. Certain people used to sit around tables in Geneva and other such places to hammer out world standards for everything from spectrum allocation to telecommunications protocols. It is a different matter that many a times this takes so long that the standard becomes obsolete by the time it is agreed upon.

This happens because the assumptions and mind sets of these committees are that they think that electrical signals are like screw threads. For nuts and bolts to work from country to country, we have to agree upon every critical dimension, not just some of them.

If you had the right number of threads per inch or cm the match of nut and bolt would still not work if the diameter was wrong. The mechanical world is very demanding that way.

Bits are more forgiving. They lend themselves to higher order descriptions and protocols. Protocols can be very specific about how two machines handshake. The term `handshaking' is the technical term for how two machines establish communications, deciding upon variables and words to be used in their conversations.

Just listen to your fax or data modem next time you use it. All that beeps are literally the handshaking process. These calls are negotiations to find the highest terrain from which they can trade bits, with the greatest common denominator of all variables.

At a yet higher level we can think of protocol as meta standards or languages to be used to negotiate more detailed bit swapping methods.