Tuck 141 - Pass the Tuck
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This story is 110 words long.
Comments
Always wonderful to have a
Always wonderful to have a new chapter of Tuck!
I wish the details of what Val tells Ricky that he has to keep a secret was reveled to us, but I'm sure Ellen will cover it in a later episode, in wonderful detail. I'm excited for Ricky training!
What era?
What era does this story exist in? I noticed they were talking about modems and not nics to connect to the network. Even if the server is housed at Tuck's, you would connect through a VPN tunnel through the internet to access the programme, not a dial-up through a modem. Therefore, I am guessing the time line is pre-internet era, although AOL was mention, so it is at least that fuzzy time between private online services like AOL and Compuserve, and true world wide web access. Somewhat blurry here on when this story occurs in the timeline.
well, the story started in 1997, and why not modems?
and has progressed less than 2 years, I believe.
Thus the technology is about 1998-1999 ( Tuck and his dad are likely to keep on the cutting edge, Valerie will be dragged along with Tuck )
As for modems? Modems are not obsolete, even for non-dialup connections. I have a cable modem, which provides me an 8Mbps connection, faster than most of the sites I connect to can feed anything to me.
My modem can handle 100Mbps from the cable, and my Wi-Fi router can handle 54Mbps
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
Thanks
Now I have an understanding about the timeline and why Tuck is talking modems. And modems are obsolete technology as far as computers and the internet are concern. To my knowledge, no new computers ship with modems although you can still buy them and several of the older machines on my network have modems in them.
A cable modem is not really a modem at all. Yes, it does carry the name and that was one of those things that should not have happen. Modem is an acronym for modulation/demodulation and that is not the case at all in a cable modem. A cable modem is more of a bridge between your network and the ISP's network.
In Tuck, he is referring to a modem that is use to send packets over the telephone lines and the best that could be achived using POTS was around 56K although most never saw those speeds. If fibre optics had been put in place to the homes, the telephone companies could have seen the market the cable companies now have in internet access. They finally manage to get DSL running over copper in noisy circuits, but typically the speeds are lower than cable and the costs are higher. If both services are available, cable is the better choice.
Not obsolete .... yet
There are a number of computers I have seen during Black Friday that had modems in them, including some HP quad core systems so they can't be THAT old. Modems are probably more useful for faxing then anything. I am still using a modem for now but I will probably switch over to DSL myself. And no I am not a luddite as I, like most folks, have high-speed access at work.
Kim
great chapter
Another great chapter by Ellen. It is always worth the wait. Current time in the Tuckverse is 1998, so for the girls they are only going to connect thru a modem. While Tuck uses a dedicated T1 line. Valerie is telling Ricky to fight back, with Mikes help they will teach him more of those lessons from the summer. What I want to know is why Pam felt the need to disappear when Debbie came over at lunch. Is she that worried about Debbies reaction that she doesnt want to provoke her?
About Debbie
I always got the feeling that Tuck and Debbie are actually suppressing their true feelings about each other. Remember when Tuck jumped down a couple of floors to defend Debbie from the jerk? He reacted without thinking in that case. He saw Debbie in trouble and went to help her. Others may see that Tuck and Debbie do have feelings that are suppressed and as anyone who follows this little tale, you don't really want to get on Debbie's bad side.
*thwack*
thwack, thwack, thwack!
Tuck begins just before Halloween 1996. The year is not shown in the timestamps in the story, but you can (fairly easily) correlate day of the week with the month-and-day, for some timestamped scene in which the day of week is mentioned, and then you can go and look at calendars until you discover a year in which the day of week matches. But it's well-accepted that the story is set with a start in 1996, and that it is now 1997 in the story, just over a year since the first episode introduced us to Eugene (Valerie) Tucker.
If you're too young to remember what technology was available in 1996 and 1997, perhaps you should refrain from condemning the author for having taken the time and trouble to insure that the story does not contain ridiculous anachronisms? (In fact, it does contain occasional anachronisms, in the other direction, such as browsers that didn't exist at the time, but it's pretty hard to insure that memory remains accurate).
Modems were not, at the time, the height of technology, but ISDN or dedicated lines were silly expensive. Cable and DSL were not in the picture. Cell phones were rare beasts (in the United States, which insisted on a hands-off approach that led to less availability than most third-world countries). In November '96, Clinton was elected to a second term as president.
The technology presented is, on the whole, reasonably authentic for the time.
But please, please, if you're going to correct timelines, do so *correctly*! It makes it far easier to determine the actual state of play in technology.
Amy!
OK, that explains it
I knew it. I went by the file date on chapter 1.
But I knew the technology was about right for that time. I jumped from 28K to 56K in 1957. ( What an improvement from my first experience with a 16 baud Modem in 1973.
As to no browsers? I was using Netscape in 1996, and it first came out as Mosaic in 1994.
Internet Explorer came out in 1995.
Call phones were luggable bricks until 1990-91ish
Motorola brought out the MicroTAC, a 7 ounce semi-foldable phone in 1989, but it was VERY expensive.
Yes, the competition here slowed things down, with too many different types of networks and suppliers.
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
oww!
I am very sorry about the date, thank you for smacking me about that. I don't know how i got the date so messed up considering I have been following the story almost from the beginning. And Ellen does do a great job presenting the technology.
ISDN wasn't that expensive
ISDN wasn't that expensive in those days, and DSL already existed, if you knew who to talk to. Maybe it was because I ran the ISP back then, but I had a Netopia ISDN router in my house to connect back to the main office, and I would expect that the Tucker family would have access to similar technology. It would have been fairly trivial in those days to have a 768K SDSL line for the cost of nothing more than a couple of modems and an alarm circuit (meaning the coil taps would be removed).
ISDN and DSL
By 1998/1999 ISDN dialin accounts had gotten to be as cheap as $24/month if you knew where to shop (that's per channel) but the bigger expense was that an ISDN circuit was considered a business product and therefore most telco's charged a $0.01 per minute fee per channel for usage. So a Dual Channel (128K) ISDN connection, averaging 2 hours per day, 30 days a month, would cost about $84/month which is more than most households wished to spend on internet at the time (Now those numbers are much different). Oh yeah, there was also a form of ISDN that basically had your ISDN circuit paired directly into the ISP's boxes at your neighborhood box, and that was unlimited access, but much higher ISP fees. But that depended on distance, and whom your ISP was for pricing. I believe it was Centrex ISDN. I'm stretching my memory here.
As for DSL, I'm not sure about Cincinnati, but as was pointed out, a straight alarm circuit (just bare copper connection) and the right equipment on each side would bear a SDSL or ADSL connection for cheap, which is something Tuck's dad should have known being as he owned his ISP :) BUT, I also know that right around 1999/2000 PacBell in California started rolling out large scale DSL trials to many of it's local offices. Pricing was about $54/month for 1.54MB Down, 128K up.
=P/KAF
P.S. Dialup is FAR from dead. There are several ISP's that survive solely on Dialup access, and many communities still without broadband of any kind (except satellite). My mom in fact, has 2 Best Data external modems connected to Router that uses dual-channel dialup access :) Back in the day I believe it was called shotgunning.
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