What the H-E- Double Hockey Sticks is....

[Hawk-eye]

All I got was a wedgie.

Must have been during the great decoder ring shortage this very month!!!!

[JohnSawyer]

and there is no such thing as an acoustical modem. I did have an asynchronous one, a long long time ago....

OK, Technically, all phone-based modems are acoustical. The "Acoustic Coupler" was a 300 baud device that had rubber cups that you attached to the modem. Some were even part of the thermal-(aka Fax paper) line terminal...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

Crud, I'm showing my age... I used one of these in like 1980... A year before MS released MS-DOS 1.0...

Back in the day when the Zilog Z80 chip was king...

[gargoyle]

What ever you do, don't hit spellcheck. It'll crash your hard drive.

By the way, I do own the decoder ring!!

[Boris Losdindawoods]

OK, Technically, all phone-based modems are acoustical.

Nope. You were right the first time. Something is acoustic or acoustical only if you have a mechanical wave of compression and rarification in the air. Without an air gap, it's all just electrons and I don't know anybody who has sense organs that can gain anything meaningful from electrons in the 20-20k range. So, any modem that used an acoustic coupler was an acoustic modem and the rest were just modems.

Trivia: If you install a Z80 backwards (rotated 180 degrees) it will smell really funny when you power it up. If you then power it down and attempt to remove it, it will give you nasty burns on your fingers. Oddly, it will still work just fine once it's cooled down and has been installed correctly.

[lori]

I never thought of those things as a modem in the first place.

Did you also have a tape drive that took programs off a cassette? We'd load up backgammon with one of those, go make us some mac n cheese, come back, and wait another few minutes before we could play.

[Hawk-eye]

Wanna feel old ... I got through college with a slide rule! Top that you young whipper snappers!

[Dutch]

I have been on here a while and I still have to look up the abreviations. The HF ones I know pretty well. It is the ones from teh outside world that get me confused. FWIW I don't ususally abreviate. It's more likely a mispelled word. There should be list of common mispelled words.

[oldgringo]

Many times, I just skip over posts that are full of abbreviations, acronyms, and arcane references (alliterations are okay ). I know I miss a lot by doing that, but some times, I just don't have the patience.

[MacEntyre]

and there is no such thing as an acoustical modem.

Submarines use them.

[TeeDee]

Some members are addicted to acronyms.

I've waded through posts where the writers have literally made them up as they write. They use acronyms and then throw them away and never use the same one again.

The one thing that I am really thankful about is that it is mostly just about 1 or 2 people that really, really, really abuse the use of acronyms in this manner. I have gotten to the point with them that I very rarely bother reading anything they post. Just not worth the time spent decoding their stuff. Too bad because a lot of the time I think they have something useful to impart.

A lot more use acronyms like they are English.

The only people I have seen that abuse acronyms more are those who write military manuals/reports/technical articles/well anything for the military.

Of course, I don't do "texting" on the phone, but I suspect from I have seen that I never will either.