The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-and-meaning-of-that-ol-dial-up-modem-sound/257816/

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

85 50 14 years ago

_b8r0• 14 years ago

The Dial-up modem sound is something that an entire generation will grow up today having never heard. In fact, there's probably a fair few HN'ers who've never heard it.

These sounds are normally lost forever, like the sound of a valve radio as it's valves warm up, or the sound of a vinyl record playing before or after the song.

I'd like to ask HN'ers out there, what was your favourite sound of old that's no longer common?

sp332• 14 years ago

I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but the old Apple floppy drives were pretty nice. (You could tell if your program was loading properly by listening, a skill I used right up until hard drives got too quiet.) I remember being jealous of my friend whose Apple //c drive sounded nicer than my Apple ][e :)

I think the sounds we remember most strongly are the ones that played when we were anticipating... modem sounds, floppy loading sounds, the part of vinyl records before the music, etc.

rmATinnovafy• 14 years ago

Same with the 1541 disk drive on my old C64. I could "feel" what it was doing by the sounds coming from it.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

Speak for yourself, that horrid buzzing noise when a disk was formatted or having read problems haunted my nightmares as a child.

"Aw nuts, gotta format a disk.. okay.. key in the command.." book it from the room at high speed

BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

"Whew, made it out safe"

toemetoch• 14 years ago

Most memorable is the 1200 baud DTMF of my setup dialing to the local packet gateway. They're still around, though. The spinning/stopping of the C64 cassette drive. And the head of a floppy drive seeking sectors, one developed a cunning sense (from trauma) to tell from the sound whether a failure was about to happen.

mey• 14 years ago

Got very good at listening to drive platters for that scratching noise that indicated the head was crashing and the drive needed to be replaced soon. Now my SSD is silent and I blindly sit and wait for wear leveling algorithm to fail.

shrikant• 14 years ago

The rhythmic -- almost hypnotic -- screek screek of a dot-matrix printer.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Some people make music with them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU

With the rise of chiptunes, I have a feeling that a lot of older sounds will be heard by the youth of today - they just won't realize what, exactly, they mean.

planetguy• 14 years ago

Or the clattering whirr of a daisy wheel...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQkbT-g3aw

Actually pretty annoying. Though not as bad as the dot matrix.

shrub• 14 years ago

A dialling modem is my favourite, followed closely by the dot-matrix printer. My dear mother used to create multi-page decorative banners for our birthdays and print them with the old dot-matrix printer. We'd colour the banners by hand with smelly markers or crayons.

ars• 14 years ago

> what was your favourite sound of old that's no longer common?

The speak and spell. Boogie boogie.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

At the Vintage Computer Festival one year I set up a PDP-8/M running FOCAL-8 connected to an ASR-33 teletype. To load the program you keyed in a boot loader sequence, a really trivial one, and then loaded the real boot loader off paper tape, then loaded FOCAL off of paper tape.

One of the really humorous things was the sound that a teletype makes, when reading paper tape or typing out listings at 10 characters per second, has been so immortalized in early movies as the sound a 'computer' makes that people would be drawn to the sound, having never actually seen a Teletype in the flesh before!

dandrews• 14 years ago

FOCAL! I spent many hours in front of a PDP-8L and ASR33 that was on loan to my smallish (at the time) university. It was my first exposure to a computer that was smaller than my apartment. 4K 12-bit words, I think it was?

I just looked, and I still have a 1970 copy of DEC's "Programming Languages" manual, which contains the FOCAL language description. Thanks for the memory jog.

rwhitman• 14 years ago

Rewinding a tape cassette.

The sound of the tone arm retracting at the end of a record on an automatic turntable.

drumdance2• 14 years ago

For turntables that supported a stack of records, the sound of the next record falling onto the platter.

The sound of an 8-track tape switching to the next track.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

Saving or reading data on cassette on a Trash 80 (that's TRS 80 for you young'uns). Waiting five minutes for those 80 lines of BASIC to load.

cnvogel2• 14 years ago

For me, it's also the sound of modems, here's a small story explaining my personal connection to these modem sounds.

In the 90s I used to get my emails from BBSs and frequently the first thing I did after waking up was to boot up the PC and make it call the (at those times usually busy) BBS. While taking a shower, brushing teeth, getting dressed etc... there was this long chain of

Pick-up, Dialtone, Dialing, Busy... Wait. Pickup, DIaltone, Dialing, Busy... Wait. Pickup, Dialtone, Dialing, Busy...

until finally, maybe after 10-15 minutes it would connect, so I could sit down on the computer and check for new emails. Then there was the 2nd call to upload replies to the BBS... This was daily routine for a few years!

I still own the trusty Telebit T2500 and a USR Courier, I think I'll have to put them up my small Server/NAS just for the fun of being able to dial in and fetch my emails, maybe with an android-phone? ;-)

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

There are lots of sounds I definitely won't miss. Such as the high-pitched targeted whine of a CRT or a magnetic disk drive, or the excessively loud whirr of an optical drive.

One thing that I find interesting, although I'm not sure whether I will miss it or not, is how the dial tone is going away. With modern phones you never hear the dial tone, you only start hearing the call when it's dialing.

StephenFalken• 14 years ago

By far, the sound of ZX Spectrum's games loading back in 1982 , when I was a kid, is definitely the greatest and most favourite digital sound of my whole life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6uwfM8F5uU

ghostDancer• 14 years ago

Yes , i was thinking about the same, those 4 minutes(more or less) to load the 48k programs and the way it sounded different when it loaded the opening screen graphics or the rest, the headless blocks and all, down to memory lane.

larrys• 14 years ago

"favourite sound of old that's no longer common"

Stepper motors in fast dot matrix printers (such as the Okidata 2410) and in phototypesetters (such as the Itek Quadritek)

ColinWright• 14 years ago

I remember putting a de-tuned AM radio next to my TRS-80 to listen to the program's progress. I was using various algorithms to factor integers, primarily Pollard Rho, and I could tell when it was stepping and when it was GCDing by the different sounds coming from the radio. I could estimate the sizes of the numbers by the pitch, and generally make sure things were working properly.

bunderbunder• 14 years ago

Now I'm nostalgic for when I used to be able to listen and tell what speed the connection was going to be. And sad now that I've realized that I can't remember what 300 baud sounds like anymore.

jaylevitt• 14 years ago

And then there was the Commodore 1670, a 300/1200 bps modem with auto-answer. Not only "with" auto-answer; with auto-answer on by DEFAULT, with settings in RAM, and with a computer that you restarted by hitting the power switch. In an era when most people had only one phone line.

A critical Commodore skill was the ability to respond to the 1670's answer tone by whistling a 300 baud originator tone, so the 1670 would "detect" carrier, then "detect" carrier drop and hang up the line. So you could talk.

Aqwis• 14 years ago

I wonder why it was necessary for consumer modems to make these sounds. It's not really useful for debugging, so in the end it was just an annoying sound. Yes, I know you could often turn it off, but as far as I know the sound was always turned on by default.

GuiA2• 14 years ago

It made the user feel like something beyond their mere mortal understanding was happening.

spydum2• 14 years ago

For what its worth, you definitely could identify the data rate before windows would report it. I used to listen and when I heard it connect at 26400, Id disconnect and retry until I heard and saw 33.6 or better. Not all of those trunklines were created equal back then.

eclipxe• 14 years ago

Man I remember those good times. 14400..meh....but 33.6!!! Whoo! 56k modems were a pipe dream. We have it good these days.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

What? It's useful for "debugging" alright.

Is it really a machine or a person just picked up at the other side?

Are we getting a busy signal or something else?

Is the ISP really not picking up the phone?

Also, I used it once to dial to a really busy number. Automatic dial, busy, retrial, when the call went through I just picked up the phone.

T-hawk• 14 years ago

Modem sounds were totally useful for troubleshooting. You'd know if your modem dialed someone's voice line, or answering machine, or a fax machine, or a busy signal, or "number not in service", or if it just rang with nothing answering, or if someone was already using the line for a voice call, or blessedly if it hooked up with an actual modem on the other end. You could also hear interruptions from someone else picking up a phone on the line or from call waiting; not all modem hardware would do it, but the relay on mine would audibly pulse.

The sounds of the actual connection weren't all that useful, but did at least indicate the negotiated speed between the modems (28800 and up does the kabing-kabing sound, 14400 and lower doesn't). So you'd know quickly if you hit a slow node on your BBS or AOL.

mikeash• 14 years ago

It was extremely useful for debugging. You could tell if you dialed the wrong number. You could tell if it was having trouble handshaking due to noise on the line. You could tell if the modem on the other side was slower than you expected.

Even non-technical users would get used to a certain sequence and could tell if things changed suddenly.

sad_panda• 14 years ago

It was useful when you were expecting a data call and you hear your aunt on the other end saying HELLO? WHAT IS THIS BEEPING? HELLO?

sakura_k• 14 years ago

It was totally useful for debugging. In addition to connection speed, you could also tell if your desired protocol was accepted by the computer you called. If it didn't support ZMODEM you could tell immediately by the sound of the test packets, and you wouldn't waste your time on a slow-protocol connection. That mattered when you had precious few hours in the middle of the night to download important stuff.

peppertree• 14 years ago

skrillex

drumdance2• 14 years ago

A cool song based on modem sounds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3VzSv4ErEg

ajtaylor2• 14 years ago

I'm kind of sad that my daughter won't know what a dial up modem sounds like. I can imagine the conversations now: "This is how we used to get on the internet. Can you hear those tones? That is one computer talking to another." "What, you didn't have wireless? And you had to plug your computer into the phone line? Wow Dad, you're old!"

GuiA2• 14 years ago

>I'm kind of sad that my daughter won't know what a dial up modem sounds like.

Heh, why? Do you feel like you're missing out on life because you've never had to use a telegraph ? It'll definitely be very cool to show her how it used to be, but that's likely the extent of it :)

ajtaylor2• 14 years ago

Let's just call it nostalgia. :)

dugmartin• 14 years ago

ATM0

teeja• 14 years ago

What, nobody mentioned line printers. Dot matrix, ha! <a href="http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-cdc-512-line-printer.jpg&#... a pix</a> of the Control Data 512. <a href="http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-cdc-512-line-printer-open.... at that hardware</a> and imagine the noise it makes.

Your ears haven't lived until they've been treated to one of these puppies printing the Gettysberg Address one word per line on greenbar. The noise of the paper roaring out alone makes a glass booth mandatory!

jrabone2• 14 years ago

Error writing /dev/lp0 (on fire, eh?)

rw• 14 years ago

My team made Bleeoo, a way to capture the oral history of dial-up modem sounds.

My favorite is here: http://bleeoo.com/videos/31c92a10-c228-012e-7578-12313d09290...

The main site has many more.

cnvogel2• 14 years ago

There's an anotated diagram of a V.32 (9600 bps) connect at http://www.3amsystems.com/wireline/hmo-v32.htm

rmason• 14 years ago

Most hams under fifty have never heard a peculiar style of sending morse code using a bug

http://pages.suddenlink.net/wa5bdu/Vibroplex----Angle---web....

known as a banana boat swing.