My work habits will change, however, as more people tap into data bases and the costs decline; I’ll be very selfish and put in a good word for Dialog and the rest, hoping eventually to share these economies of scale!
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Of Packets and Freight Trains
Packet switching lowers the cost of computer communications nets and information services, making it possible for you to send 1,000 words coast to coast for as little as $1.
The technique, developed by the military, lets many machines jabber away at once on the same phone line.
To tap into a packet-switching net, you typically dial local numbers or 800 ones reachable nationally. Giant networks like Telenet and MCI Mail use many different phone lines, but that’s still a fraction of what they’d need without packet switching.
Just imagine each of the nets’ phone lines as a rail line. Many trains (packets specifying the starts and ends of extrabrief computer transmissions) can zip over the tracks at once if you keep them from crashing into each other. The trains carry freight (bits and bytes of information). Electronic labels assure that the cargo reaches the right destinations (the gizmos that forward the information over the phone line to the receiving computers).
Naturally, the use of common trains and rail lines (a packet-switching network) is more efficient than replicating the arrangement for each cargo recipient (each computer).
This explanation, though simplified, sums up the technique according to Vinton G. Cerf, a top packet-switching expert.
Incidentally, packet-switching techniques[techniques] can also increase the efficiency of networks connecting computers in the same office.