Strategic XML

Chapter 16. Accessing Remote Systems with SOAP

When I was still working at Microsoft, I went in to visit one of my friends and see what he was working on at the time. This was in the early 1990s, and dial-up Internet connections were still ubiquitous. My friend was an expert in signal compression technologies, and he proceeded to explain to me what he was doing.

The gist of his explanation was this: “Now, with superior compression technology, we are able to make a computer digitize a human voice, compress it, and transmit it over a telephone line to another computer, which can then decompress it and play it back.”He also told me that they were getting “near-telephone quality.” I told him that that was great, and that pretty soon it looked like ...