Ems

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, 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.

Ems

 

a river in the northwestern part of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Ems is 371 km long and drains an area of 12,500 sq km. It rises on the southwestern slopes of the Teutoburg Forest and flows over the North German Lowland, emptying into the Dollart of the North Sea and forming an estuary 20 km long. The mean flow rate is 72 cu m per sec; the water level is higher in winter and spring. The river, which has been straightened and canalized in places, is navigable to the city of Greven. The Ems is connected by canals with the basins of the Rhine and Weser rivers and is part of a waterway connecting the Rhine industrial region with the North Sea. The cities of Rheine, Lingen, and Leer are on the Ems and the seaport of Emden is near the mouth.

Ems

, Bad Ems

1. a town in W Germany, in the Rhineland-Palatinate: famous for the Ems Telegram (1870), Bismarck's dispatch that led to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Pop.: 9666 (2003 est.)

2. a river in W Germany, rising in the Teutoburger Wald and flowing generally north to the North Sea. Length: about 370 km (230 miles)

EMS

Expanded Memory Specification

EMS

(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) The plural of "em space." See em.

(6) (Expanded Memory Specification) The first technique that allowed DOS to reach beyond one megabyte, which was a big deal in those days. EMS provided access to 32MB by bank switching through a 64KB page frame in the upper memory area (see UMA). The application had to be written for EMS, such as Lotus 1-2-3 and AutoCAD, or was run with EMS-compliant system software such as DESQview. In IBM PC XTs and ATs, EMS required a board and driver, but 386 PCs could create EMS memory from extended memory. See DESQview.

EMS was confusing. Not only did expanded memory (EMS) and extended memory sound alike, but the user had to specify how much EMS was needed. Then Windows came out and managed all the RAM in the PC and allocated EMS automatically.