Readers of a certain age will be haunted by a certain string of beeps, boops, fuzz and mechanical sounds for the rest of their lives. This is a far cry from the buttery-smooth connections we’re used to today, but in fact, our first connection to the World Wide Web was at speeds of 56.6 kilobits per second using certain modems. It was based on a dial-up connection that boasts amazing speed.
Eventually, thanks to a special chip known as the Amati Communications Overture ADSL chip set, we transcended. Gone are the days of lightning-fast images that took forever to load, and a new era with speeds up to 100 Mbit/s, nearly 2,000 times faster, is here. This paved the way for a new kind of Internet filled with multimedia.
Digital Subscriber Line/Loop (DSL) is a technology that enables access to the web by leveraging existing telephone lines and transmitting data through a modem, and many companies are using DSL’s competing standard. I was working on it. This standard is thanks to Amati Communications, a Stanford startup.
The chip that sparked the web boom
Amati Communications was one of many companies working to develop a new approach to accessing the Internet when it devised the DSL modulation approach known as Discrete Multitone (DMT). It states that this is a way to improve communication by making a telephone line resemble hundreds of subchannels, taking bits from the poorest channels and donating them to the richest. IEEE spectrum. This eventually became the world standard for his DSL, and the chipset became widely adopted many years later.
The company continued to promote its iconic chipset throughout the ’90s, with initially very modest sales, but a rapid rise as the decade drew to a close and the dot-com bubble approached.
Texas Instruments then acquired the company in 1997 for $395 million. This was the company’s first deal in the hardware field. The Texas-based semiconductor manufacturer was keen to use its DSL technology developed by Amati to deliver broadband multimedia services such as high-speed Internet access and real-time video over telephone lines.
By the 2000s, chipsets had shipped in the millions and faster broadband access was gradually making its way into homes and offices in developed countries. We may now be enjoying its demise with the rise of full-fiber broadband, but it’s important to appreciate just how important that first leap away from the dreaded dial-up tone was and the possibilities it opened up for society as a whole. It’s worth it.
