Ems

Ems, town, Germany

Ems or Bad Ems (bät ĕms), town (1994 pop. 10,130), Rhineland-Palatinate, W Germany, on the Lahn River. Chartered in 1324 as an important lead and silver mining center, it has been one of Europe's most famous spas since the late 17th cent. It was the site of the Congress of Ems (1786), which acted to reduce papal influence in the German Catholic Church. Bismarck drew up (1870) the Ems dispatch there.

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Ems, river, Germany

Ems, river, 208 mi (335 km) long, rising in the Teutoburger Wald, NW Germany, and flowing NW into the North Sea near Emden. Its wide mouth is called the Dollart. The Ems is paralleled for much of its course by the Dortmund-Ems Canal. The

Emsland is a swampy region between the lower course of the Ems and the Dutch border. Extensive drainage projects (begun 1928) have reduced the moors and swamps. Oil and natural-gas fields were developed in the region after 1940.

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(1) (Electronic Message Service) The part of the radio spectrum assigned to electronic messaging over digital satellite circuits.

(2) (Electronics Manufacturing Services) A company that makes electronic devices for other companies. See contract manufacturer.

(3) (Enterprise Messaging Server) Original name for Microsoft's Exchange Server. See Microsoft Exchange.

(4) (Enhanced Message Service) An extension to the SMS short message service for cellphones that allows for the transmission of formatted text, icons, animations and ringtones. Introduced in the summer of 2001 by Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens, it allows up to 17 SMS messages to be strung together. See SMS and MMS.

(5) (Expanded Memory Specification) The first technique that allowed DOS to reach beyond one megabyte. It provided access to 32MB by bank switching through a 64KB page frame in the UMA. The application was either written for EMS (Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, etc.) or was run with system software that supported it, such as DESQview. In XTs and ATs, EMS required a board and driver, but 386 PCs could create EMS memory from extended memory. See UMA and DESQview.

There was a lot of confusion over EMS. Not only did expanded memory (EMS) and extended memory sound alike, but you had to specify how much EMS you needed. When Windows came along, it managed all memory in the PC and allocated EMS automatically for old DOS applications that required it.

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EMS - Expanded Memory Specification