With communications software and a modem, you can:

• Subscribe to a commercial information service and get the latest stock quotes and news.
   
• Send E-mail (electronic mall) to friends and business associates directly or through an information service.
   
• Post and read notices on computerized bulletin boards (anything from software reviews to resumes).
   
• Download copies of uncopyrighted software from bulletin boards.
   
• Access your business computer from home.
   
• Order clothes and other things through electronic shopping catalogs (a service sometimes described as E-mall).
   
• Bank from home (if your bank offers electronic banking).

The obvious advantages of telecommunicating are speed and convenience. You can send and receive mail in minutes instead of relying on the mail service. You can get news stories and stock quotes before they're published, and you can go straight to the news that interests you instead of wading through all the other news in a newspaper or TV program. You can research court cases and topics for books, articles, or homework assignments without going to a library.

A less obvious advantage of exchanging information over phone lines is that it circumvents the incompatibility that otherwise exists between different brands of computers. You can't take an IBM^® disk, put it in an Apple II disk drive, load the document into the Apple II, and work with that document. But you can send a document from an IBM computer to an Apple II computer over phone lines and save it on an Apple II disk.

Before you establish contact with a particular computer or Before you establish contact with a particular computer or informations service for the first time, you need to tell your communications application how to talk to that other computer. You do this by giving your communications application certain information about that computer (information like baud, number of data bits, number of stop bits, type of parity, and so on).

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Chapter 5: Application Programs