Zoom For Dummies

Introduction

Depending on your age, you may take today’s powerful communication technologies for granted. (I have done it myself.) Trust me, however: Not that long ago, communicating with others was a dramatically different experience.

As recently as the early 1990s, the most pervasive methods for exchanging messages included instruments of which you may have never heard: landlines, intra-office memos, typewriters, and Telex and fax machines. For personal correspondence, handwritten letters were commonplace, not relics of a bygone era.

The following statistic illustrates the extent to which communication has changed over the last 30-plus years.

On January 24, 2001, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released a study on the telecommunications industry. Remarkably, the FCC found that the average per-minute rate for interstate calls in 1984 was roughly 17 cents. (Read the study yourself at bit.ly/fcc-zoom.)

Say that you lived in northern New Jersey in 1984, as I did at the time. You called your friend in New York and talked for an hour. You could expect to pay $10 for the privilege. And forget about international calls. Back then, talking to someone in another country was prohibitively expensive. (And you think that long-distance relationships are hard now?) Even worse, the quality and reliability of audio calls usually left more than a bit to be desired. As for video calls, they were pipe dreams back then.

Fast forward to today. Put mildly, we’re not in Kansas anymore. ...