The Bell 101 dataset or Bell 101 modem was the first commercial

modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...

for computers, released by

AT&T Corporation AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...

in 1958 for use by SAGE and in 1959 made commercial shortly after AT&T's

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

announced their 110 baud modulation frequencies. The Bell 101 modem allowed

digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals ** Digital camera, which captures and stores digital ...

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

to be transmitted over regular unconditioned telephone lines at a speed of 110

bits per second In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (bitrate or as a variable ''R'') is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. The bit rate is expressed in the unit bit per second (symbol: bit/s), often in conjunction ...

. Bell 101 modems are no longer in use and were quickly replaced by its successor the

Bell 103 modem The Bell 103 modem or Bell 103 dataset was the second commercial modem for computers, released by AT&T Corporation in 1962. It allowed digital data to be transmitted over regular unconditioned telephone lines at a speed of 300 bits per second. I ...

. SAGE modems were described by AT&T's

as conforming to the Bell 101 dataset standard. The Bell 101 modems were the first commercial equipment to use

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

, which was called "four row", as opposed to the Baudot "three row" 6-bit/character code which was predominant from 1908 to 1962, prior to the rise of EBCDIC.

See also

References

Further reading