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"In the 1948 paper that created the field of information theory, MIT grad (and future professor) Claude Shannon threw down the gauntlet to future generations of researchers. In those predigital days, communications channels - such as phone lines or radio bands - were particularly susceptible to the electrical or electromagnetic disruptions known as "noise.""

"It's the early 1980s, and you're an equipment manufacturer for the fledgling personal-computer market. For years, modems that send data over the telephone lines have been stuck at a maximum rate of 9.6 kilobits per second: if you try to increase the rate, an intolerable number of errors creeps into the data."