Page 10 - How to be Cyber Safe + Savvy

CHAPTER 1: Using Devices With Confidence
Look How Far We've Come
Remember the dial tone? It
was great. You picked up the phone, heard a quick click, then
a steady hum, and you had one thing to do — dial a number, or actually
seven numbers. Whether using a ro- tary or touch-tone device, you dialed those seven numbers to initiate an insistent ring-a-ling inside someone else’s house, a request for some
time to have a conversation.
Then at the end of the conversation, you just put the hand-set back in the cradle, auto- matically terminat- ing the connection, and went on with your day. The phone,
as well as the line into your house that connected it to the network, served just one purpose: to enable you to make a phone call to someone
else who also had a phone in their house. One device, one purpose, with a dedicated channel for making it all work. This is how most of our home technology devices worked in pre- internet days. Televisions brought sitcoms, sports, and movies into our houses with antennas that captured Very High Frequency and Ultra High Frequency radio waves. Radios deliv-
ered sound by capturing waves from a different part of the electromag-
netic spectrum.
These communications technologies were “dumb,” with data traveling
just one way: inbound. Other home technologies were even
“dumber,” not taking in data at all, just power. Think stereo
10 CYBER SAFE + SAVVY