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 Modulation#Digital modulati ...

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 Sage or SAGE may refer to: Plants * ''Salvia officinalis'', common sage, a small evergreen subshrub used as a culinary herb ** Lamiaceae, a family of flowering plants commonly known as the mint or deadnettle or sage family ** ''Salvia'', a large ...

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 development, research and scientific developm ...

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

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...

to be transmitted over regular unconditioned telephone lines at a speed of 110 bits per second. Bell 101 modems are no longer in use and were quickly replaced by its successor the Bell 103 modem.

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 Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding ...

See also

References

Further reading