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> those tones

It's my ring tone. I love the weird looks on people's faces when I'm in a meeting and my phone rings -- especially the "older" crowd (some of the "youngsters" don't recognize the sound).

Such a great idea :-)

Mine too! I have the V.92 version, which gives careful listeners the impression of a slight anachronism since most people stopped hearing those tones before V.92 came out. :)

It definitely causes double takes on the rare occasions my phone isn't on silent and I receive and actual phone call.

Did you know each manufacturer had a unique sound for their v90 handshake? This one sounds like a Lucent WinModem. (Based on listening to the sounds here[1]. Yay for RealAudio!) The USR/3Com modems were two "bongs" (four if the higher speed failed). But I was always fond of the Rockwell sweep[2].

Of course, required reading is HN favorite Oona Räisänen's excellent analysis of a modem handshake.

[1] http://modemsite.com/56k/trouble3.asp

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c

[3] http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...

The 'bongs' were known in the trade as the depth charges.

Yeah, I listened to the file and immediately thought: that's not how my US Robotics sounded! It's amazing how one remembers it after all these years. In my case, it's probably because of the poor line quality, one always connected with the sound on, and one prayed quite a bit to get a good connection.

Damn. Nostalgia hit right there. I had a lucent winmodem. I rrmembrr the time when i did my firts switch to linux ( redhat 7) and there was no way in making it work there:( luckily I found a isa modem (33k) that was compatible out of the box, those were the times

Anybody else here guilty of stripping the low pass filters out of their local lines at night? Sure improved throughput :)

I used to listen for the noise to determine if a connection was successful. I would disconnect promptly if it sounded bad. One day I think south Florida got a new area code or something...954 and I was still calling the 305 number for the BBS in Mismi (or something I was maybe 10 at the time, things are kinda fuzzy). At the end of the month found it my parents got charged $.25 per call because it's now considered long distance.

We were just talking about this a couple days ago at work! If you listened very carefully to the handshake, you could tell what the quality connection you had. After awhile, you could even guess the final baud from the sound of the handshake, and if it was bad, you'd try reconnecting a few times to see if you could get a better connection.

The Rockwell sweep always made me think of Neo leaving the Matrix for the real world.

Absolutely! I had a USRobotics 16.8k Dual-Standard modem that I bought in 1992 under the discounted Sysop program and that thing made the coolest noises of any modem I ever owned.

You may enjoy this from the awesome windytan.com, an annotated spectrum analysis and detailed description of the steps involved in a modem dialling up an ISP and negotiating a connection: http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...

Curiously the key fits with the track I was listening to at the time: Dusky's Stick By This. Kind of interesting listening to them together.

Thanks for the handshake tone! The more, the merrier: did anyone archive examples from 1200bps up?

I've also been fruitlessly searching for line noise examples ~~~~~}}~00 etc. Remote Access had a line noise simulator; someone has to have details…

It surprises me how clearly I remember the first time I used the internet in 1995 (I was barely 7). My father worked on a predecessor to modern email in the 80s and by then was no longer programming, working in telecom instead. He had a keen interest in the internet, but it was a long time relatively speaking before we could justify the expense of a computer, modem, and home connection (service provided by Erols).

He loaded up AltaVista and explained what a search engine was, in terms that I could understand, by relating it to a library catalog. I'd only used those DOS catalogs to that point, and they were picky. I carefully typed on the Power Mac's keyboard, "Davis, Jim".

As the results crawled down the screen, I knew immediately that this was a world apart from reading old Garfield books at the library, that it was something totally new (and daunting). I really didn't know what to make of it.

A few days later I snuck into the office and printed out the career statistics of "Moon, Warren".

And let's not forget the great times that could be had by joining any large channel on IRC and sending a single command:

  /CTCP #channel PING +++ATH0

Interestingly enough, I tried it again a few months ago and was shocked to discover that it apparently still works.

Careful, it's a great way to still get k-line'd on many networks.

The DCC SEND bug is still pretty common too.

Old cruft doesn't die. Old cruft even gets ported to new platforms.

I installed https://github.com/SecUpwN/Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector the other day and found a menu entry called "AT command interface", which I shall carefully leave alone.

Yes, the chip (or sub-chip) in your phone that talks to the mobile network is still called a modem, and is still controlled with the AT command set. When you answer a call it sends "ata" (AT Answer) to the modem. It does not pick up AT commands from the data passing through, unlike the old modems.

For those like me who didn't know what the above IRC line meant, http://everything2.com/user/xmatt/writeups/%252B%252B%252BAT... is a nice writeup.

The modem I had fixed this by requiring a 1 second gap after +++ where no bytes were sent before dropping into command mode.

According to legend, the 1-second gap was patent-protected, so that's why not every manufacturer implemented it. Arguably became more of a problem after the Internet since on BBS you were mostly navigating "trusted" menus and I think BBS chat servers would even drop the string.

Ahhh, memories... Ewan (telnet), Eudora (SMTP/POP3), FreeAgent (NNTP), WS_FTP (FTP), and, of course, writing the pre-requisite .cmd login scripts.

At first, though, dial-up Internet access was a long-distance phone call so mostly I'd use a free Juno account (e-mail only with free dial-up numbers) and do as much as I could via e-mail (including abusing the FTP-by-email gateways).

Before Juno, I paid a local BBS for e-mail access (they would dial up their gateway once a day, between 0400-0500 and do a UUCP transfer -- FidoNet transfers happened during the same "maintenance period"). I would dial in, upload the e-mail I had composed offline, download my new mail, and disconnect before reading it. Blue Wave 2.12 QWK offline mail reader. I'll never forget it.

Wow, MUDs I have not thought about the one I spent my teenage years playing until you mentioned them. I just checked and to my surprise it is still online. Too bad it looks like no one plays anymore.

Some of my best computer memories of that era are from playing various MUDs, and even 20+ years later I still keep up with some of the friends I met playing MUDs during those years.

Many of the MUDs I played on are sadly long gone, but a few are still around. I still connect every so often and chat with folks, maybe do a little light RP. Some of those same friends I've been playing with, on and off, for since the early to mid 90s. Even though we're scattered all over the world, it feels like we grew up together. I suppose, we kinda did.

It always struck me odd that MUD playership kinda died off, seeing as how there are many many more people using the Internet now than there were in the 90s. Even accounting for cultural changes and technology moving on, I would have guessed that be enough new people interested in the old ways to keep the population at least level, but alas that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm glad I got to be a part of that era.

World of Warcraft (and sure, Everquest before that, but less so) seems to have done a number on text-based games. Less so MUSHes and the like, but the combat loop of MUDs--even RP-heavy ones--hasn't fared well today.

I'm glad I got to be a part of that culture. I learned a lot dealing with the everyday disasters of Bad Old C and ended up with responsibility and management long before I ever would have in the real world. Plus, they were a hell of a lot of fun when you found a neat spot that maybe nobody had seen since it was built.

MUDs are still a thing! There are heaps of little bespoke ones here and there, and lots of resources on Reddit [0].

I played one called Major Mud back in the day. When World of Warcraft came out, I thought, it's about time!

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/

EDIT: Check out this MUD, which won MUD of the Month on the subreddit above: http://www.luminarimud.com/FMud/FMud.html

I will certainly have to check that subreddit out. I really miss playing them they were something really special. I learned to program because I wanted to build areas and monsters on the MUD I played.

I've actually been working off and on on a MUD using Major Mud's dataset in Elixir for the last two years.

Really??!! That would be so good. It was such a vast game and I don't know where you can really play it anymore.

The only bad thing about it was how you had to let your character grind away for days and days on end. Most people would only come back to check on their grinds for an hour then let the script go back to its work.

I've tweaked my implementation some to make it more conducive to non-automated play. The experience needed to level is significantly lower after level 10 or so than in the original.

Also in my implementation rather than play as the original races / classes you play as Angels or Demons which can possess and play as monsters/npcs to experience different play styles without having to create new characters.

The Angel class is the default for new players and has a mechanism by which experience points are redistributed periodically from players with more to players with less which helps newer / less active players catch up / stay relevant. Veteran / active players who get tired of carrying the team can go dark side and become demons.

MajorMud had such great community support around it: Turbosentry's BBS crawling top list, Blood2HTML capture utility, MMudExplorer, Jigg's maps, Kotar's maps, the forums...suffice to say MajorMud was my late 90s and early 2000s stomping ground, transitioning from dial-up to telnet.

Things are actually looking much better now for the MUD i help run. Websockets made it possible to bring the game to a whole new crowd without requiring them to install some odd telnet thing. We had a few years when things did not look good at all and player numbers dropped every month.

> So yes, thank you Trumpet Winsock. Without you my formative years would have been very different and I likely wouldn't be in the career I'm in now.

Same here. I still recall the first time I ever went online. My mind was blown and it changed everything.

I try to think about what a younger generation who was born into an "always connected" world will experience during their time as a truly transformative moment like that.

Memories of internet in Australia in the mid-90s. We had a Maestro 33.6k modem, made just down the road in Bungendore. I remember my brother driving out there in the late 90s to upgrade the chipset to 56k. Later he set up IP masquerading on a linux box or maybe a monochrome SPARCstation and we shared the connection over our 10base2 ethernet. Dynamite internet and their controversially cancelled unlimited dial up plans...we needed to get a second phone line.

I've been recreating that experience recently by trying to connect to my university VPN from China. Less the noises themselves of course.

Wow. Reminiscent of my experiences with the Internet back in the day. I wonder, how many of us might have had the exact same beginings?