Turning PCs into Communication Station with Sportster

By Zatni Arbi

A friend recently asked me to replace the 40 MB hard disk in his 386 machine with a larger one. When I opened up the case of the PC that he had bought in the U.S. in 1991, I found a Quantum ProDrive inside. Although it had the 3.5 inch form factor, it was as thick as a full-size CD ROM drive, more than twice the thickness of the slim Seagate hard disk I was supposed to replace it with.

Even the hard disk bracket on the PC chassis had been designed to hold only one thick drive. I had promised this friend that I would keep the old hard disk in the system as the second drive, but then it became obvious that there would be no place for both of them in the bracket.

What was more interesting, though, was the price that was printed on a label I found on the top of the old Quantum: US$599.95! Can you believe it? That was the price one had to pay for a 40 MB hard disk in 1991. To put it in perspective, let's do some calculations here: At that price, we had to pay $15 for each MB of hard disk space. In comparison, this friend of mine had to cough up Rp 350,000 for the new 650 MB Seagate. Per MB, the price has thus come down to about 23 U.S. cents per MB in five years.

This reminds me of the analogy that one of my professors once made. He said, "If the price of cars dropped as fast as the price of computers, we would be able to buy a new car, drive it to this campus, dispose of it here and buy another new car to drive home." Luckily, the price of cars behaves differently from the price of computers.

The price plunge is not the only result of technology advancement (and competition among computer and computer component manufacturers, of course). The speed in terms of access time as well as the longevity of the products have improved tremendously as well.

Well, that was the highlight of the day, and now let's see what technology advancement has brought to today's modems.

Sporting Sportster

A modem, basically, is a device that lets our computer talk to another computer using a telephone line. Because computers are digital and most of our telephone network is analog, the modem's task is to modulate the signals from digital to analog and demodulate them from analog back to digital. Hence the name modem.

My first modem was capable of communicating at 2,400 bits per second (bps), and there was no fax capability. Nobody has any use for that modem today, but back then in 1988 it was such an expensive gadget and only a few people had it on their computer.

Today, certainly because of the Internet explosion, modems have become so pervasive in stand-alone as well as networked PCs and Macs. For a long time now modems have also incorporated fax capabilities that allow people to send faxes right from their computer or receive them and store them on hard disk. Traveling people who regularly use their notebook usually wouldn't live without a modem.

If you go to Computer City in Glodok Plaza, you'll find most leading brands of modems available including Hayes, Practical, Zoom, and Dynalink. My personal favorite is U.S. Robotics. The company's products have won many computer magazine awards for quality and performance, and they also come in the lower as well as upper price ranges.

U.S. Robotics has two distinct product ranges, the Courier Series and the Sportster Series. The former products generally cost twice the price of the latter. On a trip to Hong Kong earlier this year I bought an external version of the cheaper range called Sportster Vi, and I've been very happy with it. I paid the equivalent of Rp 525,000 for it.

Features

Sportster Vi is a 28.8 Kbps modem with Group III fax capability and a personal voice mail feature. In addition to transmitting and receiving data at high speeds -- on the condition that the modem at the other end is also capable of firing signals back rapidly, this modem can transmit a fax at 14,400 bps. It also has the capability to translate voice signals into digital data, and store it on hard disk.

When the answering machine on my Panasonic fax machine broke down some time ago, I was left with no means to let people contact me when none of us in the family happened to be at home. Luckily, I had the modem. I installed QuickLink, the software that came with the modem, and bingo! I had turned my PC into a reliable answering machine.

QuickLink comes with a collection of prerecorded greetings. The male voice sounds so clear that I was convinced the greetings were recorded in a studio and then converted into .WAV files. QuickLink also allowed me to record my own outgoing messages, but the result was far below in quality than the prerecorded messages. By the way, to record your own greetings, the modem's own microphone can be used or a handset connected to the modem. I used the former, but there was quite a bit of background noise.

The modem also has a built-in speaker, and the sound quality is surprisingly excellent. I have no problem recognizing the voice of the person on the other end of the line. There is also a jack for an external monaural speaker. When I connected a pair of power speakers, I found the sound to be very good although it came out of one speaker only.

QuickLink runs well in Windows 95 as well as Windows 3.x. To activate the answering machine feature, we have to load the Call Manager application and leave the PC on. We can also set up how many rings the modem should wait before the answering machine takes over so that we have the option to pick up the phone before it starts recording.

Call Manager has a window that show how many messages it has recorded during our absence. We can also choose which one we want to listen to first. Again, the messages will be played either through a handset or the speaker.

QuickLink also comes with a screen saver that shows a bouncing Call Manager Windows interface. That's neat, because the Windows- based screen saver can be locked with a password and therefore nobody else can listen to the messages that we've received during our absence. So, for example, you go out for a business meeting at a client's place and leave your own PC and its monitor on. In the meantime, people keep calling you at your office and they leave messages on your PC. Your co-workers at the office can see how many messages you have but they cannot access them -- unless you give them the password.

It does more

In addition to voice handling, QuickLink has built-in faxing facilities. Like most fax programs, QuickLink can work in the background, too. Thus we can continue working when the PC is receiving a fax. We can even tell it to download the fax being received straight to our printer in the background, so that we can receive hard copy while working on the PC.

It has most of the features that the highly popular fax software packages such as Winfax Pro have, including direct faxing from within any Windows application that has printing capabilities, cover sheet design, fax phone lists, and Quick Fax that allows you to quickly send a one-page fax for short messages. One tool that's missing in QuickLink is an OCR that can read the fax and turn it into editable text.

With QuickLink, we can create up to 10 fax and voice mailboxes. So, for example, if you have a teenage daughter who wishes to keep her messages from prying ears, you can assign a mailbox to her. Protected with a password that is known to nobody else, she will be the only person who can listen to the messages in her mailbox.

We can also assign a particular mailbox to urgent messages, and we can tell QuickLink to page us -- using DTMF numeric or alphanumeric pager immediately after the call has been completed. This feature may not work here in Indonesia yet.

More useful to small office/home office is perhaps the Fax-on- demand feature. We can tell our customers to call our PC, view all the faxes that we've made available on it, and instruct QuickLink to fax them the ones they'd like to have. For example, you are offering them a number of new products, and you scan all the brochures and save them on the hard disk. Your customers can call in, take a look at the brochures, select the ones that they want, and retrieve them on their own without interfering with your work. Isn't that neat?

One more feature that I wish QuickLink had is the call-back feature. This may not be the service that you'd like to offer to your customers. Intended for a different setting, this feature allows an employee to call his office PC, tell it his name and hang up. After verifying his identification, the office PC would automatically dial the employee's home number. Since the call was initiated from the office, the employee wouldn't have to bear the cost of the phone call. The office would have to pay for it. Unfortunately, as I said, QuickLink doesn't have this feature.

Final word

Computer and telephony has become so integrated that soon you won't see any branded PC without built-in telecommunication capability. In the latest IBM Aptiva, for example, the modem is so closely integrated into the system that the PC will turn itself on the moment it receives a phone call. This feature is called "Wake up on ring", the ringing phone wakes up computer. It's great, because it allows you to save on electricity bills while the answering machine still functions.

If you're looking for a modem to equip your small office/home office PC, at least look for the features that this modem and the bundled QuickLink software package have: high speed, compatibility with the majority of popular communication software packages, ability to function as an answering machine and save messages in mailboxes, and so on. The right modem and communication software will certainly give your small business the image of a big business.