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The modem is a plain plastic and metal box the size of a paper back book with a few flashing lights. Its appearance gives no clue to its function and it is usually consigned to a dusty out of sight corner anyway.

Yet the modem is the hub of our modern information age. It is the ubiquitous go-between of the digital domain. It takes the information of the outside world and encodes it into a form that can be sent along a cable to another modem where the process is reversed and the impulses sent are reconverted to their original form.

Millions of winking modems all around the world are the interpreters of the internet.

The modem represents our technology age in that a machine costing a few tens of pounds that few ever notice and that fewer understand, is indispensable to our daily business and lives.