The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)

windytan.com

675 pointsbpierre103 comments

I get waves of nostalgia when I hear that screeching sound.

At work, when the fax machine was still sitting in my office, I deliberately turned the sound on (for those who don't know: the initial handshake part sounds pretty much the same for modems and fax). Then we got a shiny new printer/scanner/fax that now sits in the hallway.

When I had Internet access for the first time (1996), I used a 14.4 modem for about a year, before I could switch to ISDN. To me, sound always signified a window opening to a new, magical world, where the only boundaries were your imagination and available bandwidth.

A friend of mine once dialed the wrong number, and a human picked up. Hearing a human voice from the modem was really strange.

Ah, good times (except for the crappy bandwidth and the fact that the phone company charged by the minute).

It was when Going Online was still a ritual, just like starting up the computer was - it took a while, sometimes you had to go through a menu or start up Windows or whatever separately still, you got this jingle when starting up, sometimes a login screen, all that stuff. Then going online, dialing up, telling the family (if any) that you're using the internet for a while, firing up the browser, etc. Using the internet was (for most people anyway) a very focused task too, given the per minute charge - get online, do what you want, get offline again.

I noticed that myself very quickly after getting DSL; while we had a bandwidth limit (1500 MB / month iirc), I still spent a lot of time online; freed from pay per minute, you get a lot more time to just browse and explore. Still do the latter. Usually it's browsing Reddit, but sometimes I fall into a rabbit hole.

Trumpet Winsock; login and initiate PPP; fire up Netscape Navigator.

Never heard of Trumpet Winsock before. Found this.

https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/

http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/news/3-latest-news/17-ma...

> As a result of some recent discussion about Trumpet Winsock and its use during the early 1990s, a group of users at Hacker News have decided to donate to Peter Tattam in appreciation for their use of Trumpet Winsock during the early years of the Internet.

> As a gesture of good will, Peter Tattam, the sole copyright owner of Trumpet Winsock, has also issued an amnesty on any copyright infringement by all users (individual and corporate) of Trumpet Winsock indefinitely for use prior to Jan 2011. He does however reserve all other rights in the copyright of Trumpet Winsock. Please note that Trumpet Winsock is still available for sale and is NOT free - should you wish to continue to use it, you should order a registration key from us.

Shareware!

Kind of strange how certain, obscure topics reappear on the same site. Like Reddit reposts, Hacker News apparently has articles that hit every year or every few years.

That first link literally mentions HN the last time it slashdot'd it.

>Update 20 January 2016

>After 5 relatively quiet years, Trumpet Winsock is back on the front of Hacker News. Welcome back to memories of the dawn of the mass internet age.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10935532

> Never heard of Trumpet Winsock before.

That sound you just heard was half of HN sighing at how old they feel, including me. :/

I'd heard of it, but never used it. The reason being that we were an Apple household, and so used MacPPP!

Check your fidonet. Initiate XModem. The cool kids are using YModem now.

Fire up Terminate, call my favorite BBS, log on, check messages, play some Trade Wars 2002. Those were the days. For a brief time, I had my own BBS and I was really proud when it became a FidoNet point.

ZModem and HSLink (HSLink let you download and upload at the same time .. sorta). You also had the door games and 60 min limits and spending 3 days downloading Doom which came on three 1.4M disks.

Also, it blocked the phone line - unless you had several phone lines or ISDN, going online also meant nobody could call you. And that in a pre-mobile phone setting.

After that year with 14.4k modem, I got an ISDN card. Back then, that was a huge step up. Unfortunately, with ISDN you do not get the screeching noise modems make.

Except if you had call-waiting enabled on your phone line - so if someone did call you the pips would drop the line. I think you could add some digits to the AT dial string to temporarily disable it.

Sorry for dropping carrier, got call wasted.

Friends of my parents started to mention offhand how our phone line was always busy a little while after we got the modem.

Back then it was mostly BBSes because AOL/Compuserv/Prodigy/GEnie all charged by the hour and were quite expensive. Cheapest was around $1/hour, and it didn't even get you proper Internet access. Neither did the BBSes, but at least they were free.

I was allowed to use the internet as much as I wanted after 10pm to 2am to avoid tying up the family phone line

Prodigy was flatrate for the longest time. I think it went from $12 to $15 and finally started charging by the hour (all before their Windows release. This was the dos version).

Pre internet, I had 600bps modem, and my dad had a 1200bps. Would dial into bbs systems for no reason other than curiosity haha

At one point, modems used to cost about $1/baud, when 300 baud modems cost $300 and 1200 baud modems cost $1200.

I once traded an original Hayes 2400 baud modem for a Honda CB360 motorcycle. The Hayes was a thing of beauty in its milled aluminum case.

Some people don't believe me when I tell them I've owned a home computer, with peripherals, that cost more than a new car of the same model year. Not just one, either.

When you started adding storage, a modem, daughter boards, etc., it got expensive.

You're not kidding. We sold truckloads of Kaypro II systems to college students because they were cheaper than the several thousand dollar IBM PC equivalents. Kaypro experimented with various bundles that included different word processing software but very few people had a preference of Wordstar vs Perfect Writer.

The only controversial part of any sale was the printer housing; because at the time our local professors would not accept anything printed with dot matrix we sold bundles that included a daisywheel printer. People thought we were upselling by telling them they really needed a foam-padded printer enclosure. Spending two or three hundred more on top of an already expensive purchase was often too much so people would skip the enclosure. They were usually back in a week or two looking to purchase the printer stand.

Thats actually impressive

I didn't get into it until the 14400 baud modems came out and the prices dropped precipitously. I remember we had one for the Mac that plugged into the keyboard/mouse port (ADB) which I thought was pretty weird at the time.

Then I went to school and got a PC and an ISA modem. Turns out it was a precursor to the Software Modems (Winmodems) that came out a couple of years later. It had all of the hardware to negotiate the connection and modulate the data, but offloaded the error correction and compression to the host os. Of course the drivers only worked on Win3.1, so I had to go without most of the time. Turns out it was actually better for gaming since they added latency and my phone lines were clean enough that it wasn't an issue. The only bad thing is that if someone picked up the phone, even for a second, you would lose your link. It just couldn't recover.

> I didn't get into it until the 14400 baud modems came out

You almost certainly mean 14400 bps.

It's a shame someone didn't understand, or take a moment to read up on the difference between bps and baud.

bps refers to the actual amount of data that is being shifted, in terms of 1's and 0's.

baud refers to signally changes per second.

While parent first started using dial-up during the 14400 bps era, I first started using dial-up during the 300bps (v.21) and a little while, and arguably a little worse, dabbled in 75bps during the exciting 1200/75 era (v.23) which, while asymmetric, at least offered effectively duplex communications. Just like today, assumed data flow was generally asymmetric for consumer use - a fairly safe assumption.

Anyway, on a 300bps modem, there was one bit of data transferred per signally change, so they were indeed also 300 baud modems.

v32.bis came along and offered 14400 bps -- a magical leap, but also painful for consumers as there were a number of competing "standards" or variations put out by over-eager manufacturers, and incompatibility issues were common.

But ultimately they all (AFAIK) encoded 6 bits per signally change, and so were 2400 baud modems.

Fascinating area of CS, and well worth reading up on. Start with Claude Shannon and his law.

Did you ever use 1200/75 in the reverse mode? You could get the modem to dial e.g. PRESTEL in the UK and train as a 'server' so the speeds were reversed. This gives a 75/1200 connection with 75bps down and 1200bps up, which was useful for uploading files, but meant you had a 75bps speed terminal, slower even than an original IBM selectric teletype, at 135bps!

I think I heard about this feature, but in AU there wasn't (or probably I just didn't know about them) the kinds of services where this was available or would be useful.

Most of my dial-up use was local BBS's or access into a (paid) university offering that gave me usenet and email. In both cases it was very heavy ratio of down:up - but IIRC the 1200/75 arrangement was very brief before the arrival of 9600bps.

After I left university, all I had was a (free) 2400bps connection to a modem bank on an X.25 PAD system, accessible to alumni - fortunately PPP existed and I could bring up TCP/IP over the link, at least... I actually feared this would be the only Internet access I would have from then on. Soon after that, commercial dial-up Internet access became more prevalent and I upgraded to the dizzy heights of 14k4bps and beyond!

Another thing from those days that we no longer need is something called a 'midnight line' - British Telecom in the UK offered this; although I never had one I knew of people who did. It was a phone line that was unmetered from 00h00 through to 08h00 or so, which allowed BBS and Usenet users to dial up for free across the country and exchange mail and news feeds. Phone charges at that time were prohibitively expensive, especially nationally, plus local calls were not free in the UK and things like 0800 numbers for POPs were still unheard of.

I had the 1200 in its metal case. That thing was heavy, and it had all those switches on the front that I never used. My Zoom 2400 came in plastic.

You didnt play the Pit, or Trade Wars?

you missed out then on BBSs

Curious why my BBS wasn't coming up after several redials, and with the volume off late at night so as to not disturb the rest of fam, I switched on the volume to my modem to hear this:

click "Hello, Maple Ridge Police Depar.... damnit, not this again. Let's get a line trace go.." RESET

Left your dial-out prefix set to 0118 999 881 999 119 7253, eh?

Hah I had something similar except with the volume on. Managed to figure out it was a faulty line splitter where we split the phone and modem

Turns out (at least here in the UK) if you repeatedly hit the hangup button it will dial emergency services and the splitter was doing the equivalent of that

Very disconcerting as a new internet user to have the police tell you to stop calling them through the back of the computer under the desk

They used it as weird sound an alien makes in the PBS show "Read Jet Go" (which is a fantastic kids show, btw).

It was so strange having my kids laugh at this strange noise that was a deep part of my childhood and eventual profession.

Crappy bandwidth?

I was playing populous over a 300 baud modem in the 80s with my friend.

Also, i was grounded in the early 90s for calling into PCLink and running a $926 long distance phone bill that month.

Then, we setup a warez BBS as the backside to the computer systems we setup in highschool

One of my first jobs was desoldering bad memory out of apple IIs

Man the 80s were fun times.

I used a 14.4 modem for about a year

"No one will need more than 14.4 kb /s. 14.4 kb /s ought to be enough for anybody."

I used to have it as the ringtone for my boss at work, and chuckled when I heard it because it meant work was 'dialing in' to me to figure something out :-)

It does confuse people when your phone makes that noise though and then you start talking to it.

for those who don't know: the initial handshake part sounds pretty much the same for modems and fax

I believe Step 11, in particular, is the one very recognisable as "the fax sound":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO_7lEXaJyo

BTW, every post from this blog is amazing. See the two recent ones:

http://www.windytan.com/2017/09/descrambling-split-band-voic... "Voice inversion is a primitive method of rendering speech unintelligible to prevent eavesdropping of radio or telephone calls."

http://www.windytan.com/2017/07/virtual-music-box.html "A little music project I was writing required a melody be played on a music box. However, the paper-programmable music box I had (pictured) could only play notes on the C major scale. I couldn't easily find a realistic-sounding synthesizer version. [...] Perhaps, if I digitized the sound myself, I could build a flexible virtual instrument to generate just the perfect sample for the piece!"

My favorite is "Mystery signal from a helicopter" http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-helicopt...

If I remember correctly from the last time she also has a great post about decoding RF bus stop signals. Super useful for a home assistant!

wow that is awesome

She has an interesting YouTube channel as well. Some of her signal visualizations are very cool.

I love that sort of sleuthing. It displays an incredible depth of knowledge of her subject area (signal processing), and great intuition.

I remember reading this when it came out, and it was fascinating, especially considering listening to modems to diagnose problems is how I made my bones in tech support back when CompuServe was still a thing.

I'm an old timer, and have even used a 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler that the article referred to. I listened to the evolution of modem handshakes, and had no idea what parts meant what, but over the years I correlated different problems to different sounds, and through osmosis learned the various AT commands for different chip manufacturers (the main three I ran across were Hayes/Rockwell, USR, and Motorola) to lock them in certain modes - set the flow control mode (RTS/CTS or X-on/X-off), set the max and min baud rates, and set various error control algorithm modes.

Doing tech support for a couple years in the 90s, the biggest problem I saw (beyond the fact that average users were pretty unsophisticated back then), was the quality of telephone lines in certain areas of the country. If you live in the sticks, you're screwed and lucky to achieve 9600 baud with any consistency. If you live in larger cities with crumbling infrastructure, you're likely to have some "signal bleed" (not sure what to call it) where other conversations are faintly audible on your lines. In both of these cases, the negotiation sequence would restart several times, sometimes getting lucky and connecting, but more often failing until we found the right AT commands to lock a lower baud rate and force error correction - MNP? I think that was the magic bullet in most cases.

In the end, the phone infrastructure improved greatly just about everywhere, but by then it didn't matter as much, as people started moving to cable modems, typically plugged directly into a desktop computer, running Win 95 and getting hijacked by 0 day exploits to build the first botnets. Good times.

Anyway, I'm glad to see this article has held up over time and people still find it interesting.

We used to whistle into the coupler...wish i took a picture that HS class... And also got to know the sounds.

Got online only in the late 90s, but i do recall listening to the tones as i could kinda tell if i were to get a bad connection by when the handshake ended.

what you call "signal bleed" is usually called "crosstalk": https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Crosstalk

  > Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask. [...]
  > Even then, the idea of not hearing what's happening
  > on a phone line you're calling on was quite new,
  > and modems would default to exposing the user to the handshake audio. [...]
  > 
  > All you had to do to silence the handshake was to send the command ATM0
  > down the serial line before dialing.

And I think the user was comforted by the ritual, as far as I can tell from conversations with my friends and scenes from pop culture like You've Got Mail.

I am for using the computer's own low-level apparatus as progress bars, instead of the opaque logos or polished animated graphics, blocking the view like a royal guard. For example, I wish my laptop and my phone listed the shell's output during boot, like some Linux distros still do. Even though most users wouldn't fully understand it --- and I have to admit that even I don't understand a lot of it --- the quickly scrolling text is no worse than an animated spinner in conveying, "Loading..."

I think most users, and I mean nontechnical, are okay with the exposure and even kind of like it. It makes them feel like they're in a spy movie. Some will never try to understand it and will just take it as a more-detailed progress spinner. Some will slowly become familiar with some of the lines, google them out of curiosity, and it may be the spark that lights them down the long trek to becoming a programmer. Isn't that one of our country's goals, to encourage kids to become programmers?

Anyway, my point is, I came to programming from graphic design and front-end. I spend a lot of time thinking about user-interface design. But maybe I'm against the grain in wanting some of the architecture to be allowed to hang out. (Does that make me a Brutalist?)

I'm completely with you on this, but there is one issue: many hardware platforms are simply incapable to show such scrolling text (or dump it into UART) fast enough in the early boot stages which is the reason why you don't today get that even on server-oriented distributions.

Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing.

> Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing.

"Reticulating splines"

Maxis' games (ie. "Reticulating splines", but SimCity 4 does that to) and KSP also comes to mind for this, but in these cases the messages are obvious nonsense, which is not the case for KDE.

providing a common user with access to views and doorways to discovery and deeper technical understanding is essential to user-centric design. that's how we move the ball foward in terms of baseline system-fluency, which necessarily deepens progress at the cutting edge. Furthermore the widened technical prowess means yAy! for creativity and less exploitable asymmetry for our almost-friendly techno-fascist cohorts.

Widening and deepening user involvement-- through portals, gateways, peepholes, and trap-doors-- into a labyrinth of techno-primitive toolmaking utopia.. hah

What might that look like? Who knows? I have been thinking about the variation of user-modes represented, perhaps, as masks, deepening and widening layers of involvement, according to need, habit, curiosity and play. The relation between the masks and the nature of the masks is still in geststion.

Here in SP (sao paulo), in the 13-story abandoned building we've transformed into an an artist residency and resource center, we're exploring the theme 'Ancestral/Astral' for an event set to take place in the middle of December. Ancest-ASTRAL-ity : The ideal state of discovering the essence of what makes us human, our roots, through exploratory perspectives of our shared heritage and created future.

What has interested me personally since hearing about postmarkertOS is humans and tools: the psychology of tool use, our relationship with TECHNOS. A major theme that has remained constant throughout our human story is our use of tools to influence our future.

How do we improve or make new tools? Usually with tools we've already built.

You have two fuzzily-distinct elements: tools and techniques.

But how would these design logix (like the boot-phase peephole you mentioned) materialize?

Ideally this would happen on a mobile device running linux (im most interested in developing world megacities).

Maybe start with easily malleable UI layers, that use modern web semantics (react × APIs).

Make a boot-phase people have some interaction layers thst stimulate the curious user to explore what is happening. There are a lot of ways to do it, and all of them are right.

If interested, u can find me in the postmarketOS matrix/freenode channel.

Sorry if this does not meet aesthetic requirements, im on mobile.

I am reminded that VLC have a drop down menu in their settings window that allows more and more options to be exposed. In a bit of whimsy their entry for exposing all options is "master of the universe" (or some such).

Back when I was into amateur radio, I would listen to RF noise emitted from my computer, and I enjoyed the feedback which gave me a sense of what was going on. I could tell whether the computer was waiting, polling, or just really busy.

We used to be able to tell how busy the computer is by listening to the hard drive click. As computers get quieter, this kind of feedback would be useful.

I am so used to listen to HDDs, FDDs, optical drives and other mechanical storage that these days i wish phones and tablets with solid state storage would come with a small drive activity light or ui element.

In particular as Android (at least all the versions i have interacted with) tends to "lock up" during heavy IO activity (i find Firefox to be particularly adept at triggering this for some reason), something i have come to believe is a deeply embedded behavior characteristic of the Linux kernel.

And yes i live and die by the boot scroll, and hate any and all efforts to hide these things away under the "user friendly" banner.

Classic article! I would also like to recommend http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-helicopt... - Oona is clearly a talented engineer :-)

3d spectrogram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c

Animation of the picture illustrated in this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo

If you live with someone >= 30, turn up the volume and wait for him/her to appear at the door for a nostalgia moment...

shot in the dark- that looks like a good way to visualize a bunch of timeseries lines, do you know what they are using for that graph?

In the description there is "ozone 5"

Which refers to iZotope Ozone, that audio mastering software. Normally you would put in one or two timeseries (that is a mono or stereo audio file where the y axis is amplitude).

In this case the audio is mono, and you're looking at a short time fourier transformation (STFT) with the parameters as in the description, where the height is de magnitude of the frequency bins, and the Y axis (from right to left in the video) is frequencies from low to high, in logarithmic scale as is standard in audio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3G2eHEnt7c here it is used on some music

Manually decoding the DTMF in the spectrogram gives me 1-570-234-0003, which turns up a lot of search hits.

This also takes me back to watching some modems have bad implementations of the USR protocols. Some were so bad that they'd actually watch the packet traffic for commands. I remember seeing people getting knocked offline from someone typing ATH0++ over IRC (all plaintext!), and their modem catching it as an actual USR command (the Attention-Hang Up command).

This would be more elucidative if they had the sound and a moving bar superimposed over the image so I dont have to go back and forth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo

Thanks!

I can remember at my first job (which was a long way away from the Exchange / central office).

The carrier signal was a little weak and I had to whistle the correct tone down the line to get the other end to pickup :-)

We also when we had a project that used modems for remote data collection our electronics shop modified (technically illegal) the modems with adjustable gain

I'd love to see something similar for ADSL. There's no audible part to ADSL, but there are still two modems talking to each other, and from what i understand of it, there's a rich and interesting process involved in setting up the line - tone ordering and so on.

DSL is by design placed outside the human auditory range (also why it has such limited range between home and exchange). As such, you are better off thinking about it like the analog part of most any wired network.

ISDN by contrast puts a digital signal where the PSTN analog signal normally is (iirc).

ADSL still pretty different to something like Ethernet - not that i understand Ethernet terribly well either. Ethernet is baseband: it really is a digital on-off signal, with Manchester encoding, 8/10 encoding, 64/66 encoding, etc. ADSL is broadband: there is modulation into phase and frequency patterns.

Mind you, 8/10 encoding is amazing as well, and a good explanation of that would be well worth a read for this audience!

I always wondered if it would be feasible to setup a modem connection wireless. In a way that you would have a loudspeaker and microphone at each end of a field and just transmit the noises through the air.

Yes, it is very much possible. Take a look here: https://github.com/romanz/amodem/blob/master/README.rst

The transfer speed and noise are, obviously, too low/high to make any practical use out of this, but it's a cool experiment anyways.

I remember reading about a exploit/virus for BIOS that could coordinate an attack with infrasound, but I can't find any link.

It never really panned out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BadBIOS

Here's a real exploit instead. Audio-only attack revealing RSA private keys in GPG!

https://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/

I actually experimented with this using ultrasonic signals (most people can't hear above ~16-17kHz), and with very simple modulation was able to transfer ~30bps. Was a very fun proof of concept, using just a cell phone and a speaker! I think the idea is great and there are many applications for it.

In this one I embedded the signal into a song, and then the phones would parse the modulated data to all synchronize together and create an ad hoc light show with the flashlights!

Sigh... you're making me want to put together a laptop/mobile version of PSK-31[1], just to see if I can do it.

[1] http://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-radio/operating-...

There's a constant noise for data after the connection has been negotiated. I'm not sure how loud it would have to be to work.

I do remember hooking up two modems directly with a phone line, turning off dial tone detection on the answering modem and issuing an ATA on the answering modem and a ATDT on the calling modem and negotiating a connection that way. It still was only able to transmit at roughly 3 KB/sec.

Reminds me of this DEF CON talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFTiD7EnVjU

That's basically what Google Nearby uses - one of it's options is to signal to near devices over ultrasonic audio. In fact it looks they are even using it for a payment system http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4896748/Googl...

Not sure what the actual technical specification for the method is.

That's how the early modems worked, although at a very short distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

"Wireless" transmission of sounds through the air to achieve some programmatic purpose is relatively widespread, although not very well-known. The air is a noisy medium, so ultrasound is often used to move the sounds squarely out of the frequency range that humans can produce or hear, but usually keeping it within ranges that off-the-shelf microphones can record and speakers can produce.

In recent years, one particularly significant contributor is Boris Smus [1] who released some example code in 2013 and went on to develop the Google Chromecast's ultrasonic pairing mode [2].

Ultrasonic networking has also been leveraged by tracking apps and SDKs [3], and has occasionally featured as a product pitch [4]. It also pops up every once in a while as a proof-of-concept, Show HN, or github code dump -- it's one of those "I can't believe this isn't done more often, so I'm gonna do it" ideas whose deployment is actually more widespread that most people suspect.

[1] http://smus.com/ultrasonic-networking/ [2] https://gigaom.com/2014/06/26/chromecast-will-use-ultrasonic... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13337949 [4] https://www.chirp.io/

Click "past" under the article title for previous discussions.

Lots of fascinating content in that blog!

Oona is definitely a personal hero of mine.

Heh, I remember the sound over here (The Netherlands) sounding just slightly different. Probably differences in negotiation? Amazing what nuances the brain can pickup when exposed to something often enough.

We went to 56k6 or 28k8 baud almost immediately. Other places of the world were stuck with much slower baudrates for longer. Maybe that made the difference?

Or it's just the acoustics of older, crappier speakers

There are some other versions here [1], but nothing I could find easily on Youtube -- even a BBC article from earlier this year was using the same recording as this article.

I also remember the sound being a bit different (in the UK, but probably close if not identical to the Netherlands). I'd like to test, and there's probably a dial-up modem in the junk box at work, but I don't have a phone line.

[1] http://www.findsounds.com/ISAPI/search.dll?keywords=modem

I never understood why in the United States getting 56k was impossible. It was always slightly less than that. Meanwhile in Europe I easily obtained 56k negotiation.

There was a FCC regulation limiting the transmission power sent on the line; this regulation did not exist elsewhere. It limited the speed to 53.3 kbit/s.

(2012)

I was hoping something more like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdgvceSBroU

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514

The noisiest part of the process in our house was the constant dialing to get onto AOL followed by the busy signal. Most fun when I was trying to sleep in.

Previous conversation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514

Pretty sure that the sample handshake available in the article is not for a 56k negotiation.

My ears are saying that it sounds more like a 14.4k negotiation.

Mmmmmmm. BBS glory days. Sometimes, I miss that era.

I could tell the speed of the connection by the sound of the handshake.

I always wanted to know this. But by the time I was old enough to understand it, dialup was out of my life.

Those were the days you could hack a mainframe with a cassette player. Boy did we have fun with that.

That sound brings back so many memories. BACKNEXT

that's crazy. I was just looking at this the other day and used the sound clip to make an annoying ringtone for my phone

Very intersting glimpse into our past and DTMF.

You see an interesing article.

I see a new ringtone :)

http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3

this sound will make an awesome voicemail announcement.

Stranger Things.

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