Knowledge is an aspect of life which must be interpreted while we are living, if it is to be interpreted at all. Life is the continual interplay between the individual and his environment rather than a way of existing under the form of eternity."
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."
In practice, of course, Taylor also tried to keep the proceedings as easy and as informal as possible, to the point of having the conference room furnished with beanbag chairs. He even let the speakers set the rules for how each meeting would proceed, much as a card dealer could call the game in Las Vegas; thus their nickname, Dealer Meetings. And when the arguments got heated, which they often did, the minister's son would do his best to convert a "class-one" disagreement—one in which the combatants were simply yelling at each other—into a "class two" disagreement, in which each side could explain the other side's position to the other side's satisfaction. You don't have to believe the other guy, he would tell them. You just have to give a fair account of what he's saying. And it worked. As one CSL member later explained it, Taylor's class one/class two exercise was amazingly effective at clarifying unspoken assumptions and ferreting out facts that one person knew and another didn't. "So by the time you get done," he said, "you all know the same set of things, and you end up concluding the same thing."