~/bookshelf/tags/ambient-technology
Technology as infrastructure — mature, boring, interoperable systems that just work.
The engineers were able to achieve transmission speeds of up to 1,300 bits per second with the device, which they called a modulator-demodulator—a mouthful that they quickly shortened to "modem."
System/360 would popularize such terms as "byte," along with the convention of encoding data eight bits at a time.