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

The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)

windytan.com

169 pointszdw44 comments

I've made a ring-tone out of the 56k USR modem.

Advantages:

  - The sound cuts through ALL background noise.

  - Nobody else uses it, so I don't worry about false positives

  - I geek a Nostalgia-dopamine hit when I hear it.

Disadvantages:

  - Nobody ever calls me

That's amazing. Even better than the Dubstep Nokia tone.

Sharing is caring! :o)

This is close. Edit to suit your tastes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dial_up_modem_noises.ogg

The sounds of the internet big bang!

Lol, i love how it is subtitled

this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de7MsTors2A ?

P.S.: I work with people who don't know what this is all about.

The best thing about this was having the infrastructure on public show, a bit like having a building's water pipes visible on the outside where everyone can see them. This exposure, combined with natural curiosity, meant many people had an idea of how it worked.

One takeaway from the diagram is how adaptation and channel estimation can increase channel capacity. We start off simple on the left hand side, with the dial tone and DTMF sending only a couple of frequencies at low speeds. As we move to the right each end adapts/learns and more frequencies come into play increasing the information density. Eventually the adaptation has reached some form of optimum and the information density (channel capacity) is maximised with the spectrogram being a solid mass of signals.

I heard this sound so many times that eventually I could tell if it wasn't going to negotiate properly, or negotiate at a lower speed, just by listening to it. If that was happening I could kill the attempt early and try again.

It was the time where autists were still in control :D No way today a business school product manager let engineers ship millions of next gen communication equipment sounding like loudly dying lamas :D

If I understand correctly there was absolutely 0 need to make it noisy to your ear by default except for the tester at the factory to test if it worked.

Having the speaker on was handy for figuring out if your outgoing call was picked up by an incompatible device, like your friend's mom.

My very last dial up modern had a volume knob, which was great when trying to sneak on to the internet past bedtime.

AT&M0 was the control code for muting the modem, yes very useful for not waking the parents up after midnight.

BTW which one is the "gong" sound? Probably #13 ?

Having started with compuserve on a teletype-like device that used paper rolls and an acoustic-coupler 300baud modem, it's humorous to me to watch people learn about this like brand new history in 2021.

(but wow it's weird to be that old, just plain weird, I don't feel that old, just have these weird old experiences/memories)

I remember when 1200baud came out, it just blew our minds.

Then the battle for 2400bps and 9600bps "standards" hayes vs USR, etc.

Then thousands of jobs were made (and eventually lost two decades later) just having to support 33/56k modems at places like AOL. Just non-stop tech support calls, phone lines were just not made for that.

I believe the "gong" sound was unique to K56Flex modems. USR X2 modems didn't do it, and V90 sounded a bit different.

The slowest modem I ever had the pleasure of using was 9600 baud, but even at that rate, it was way too fast for me to actually comprehend that there was a series of high and low tones representing bits.

Back in college, we had acoustically-coupled TDD devices at most payphones on campus - you'd pick up the handset, dial a number, and put it down on the coupler. Or you could just type on the coupler, and hear tones come out the speaker, at a blistering 45 baud. 45 baud is slow enough for your brain to process the different tones.

If you run minimodem as `minimodem --tx tdd`, you can hear the same thing yourself today, without the coupler.

Minus some further nifty hacks above 2400 baud, it was very convenient to think of modem breath as "the TDD tones, but much faster".

> 9600 baud, but even at that rate, it was way too fast for me to actually comprehend that there was a series of high and low tones representing bits.

To be fair, 9600 bps modem already used fairly advanced modulation (QAM+trellis) and not just high and low tones, so it is not really comprehendible to humans the same way simpler modulations are. Even at much slower rates I don't think you could make much sense of QAM signal.

Most if not all of the standards shown there are freely available here, if you want to read more:

https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-V/en

Here's V.8bis, for example:

https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-V.8b...

As far as standards go, the ITU ones tend to be pretty readable.

I really like how you can figure out the phone number dialed with the representation of the DTMF tones. This was basically an audio coordinate system (or just a 2D array): an X tone and a Y tone played at the same time.

The upper component has three positions representing the columns on a phone keypad.

The lower four positions represent the rows.

For example, zeros are represented by upper tone 2 for the middle column (2,5,8,0) and lower tone 4 for the bottom row (*,0,#).

This was basically an audio coordinate system (or just a 2D array): an X tone and a Y tone played at the same time.

Auditory....Vectors? (Thinking aloud)

The Quadrature Amplitude Modulation used by the modem (the last part of the sequence, which sounds like white noise) really is a sequence of auditory vectors.

Humans can't hear a phase difference.

You have also just described how the old analog touch tone phones actually generated the tones. Each column of buttons generated a different tone per column, and each row also generated another tone per row. A given button when pressed activated a column and a row to generate the two tones associated with that button.

Yes, that's what my intent was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_sign...

There was a fourth column (A,B,C,D) meant for menu selection, and for the US military to indicate call precedence. Also used for various kinds of system automation and signaling but not accessible directly.

And they sounded _weird_. Almost spacey.

Generate them all with:

      sox -n dtmf-1.wav synth 0.1 sine 697 sine 1209 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-2.wav synth 0.1 sine 697 sine 1336 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-3.wav synth 0.1 sine 697 sine 1477 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-4.wav synth 0.1 sine 770 sine 1209 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-5.wav synth 0.1 sine 770 sine 1336 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-6.wav synth 0.1 sine 770 sine 1477 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-7.wav synth 0.1 sine 852 sine 1209 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-8.wav synth 0.1 sine 852 sine 1336 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-9.wav synth 0.1 sine 852 sine 1477 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-0.wav synth 0.1 sine 941 sine 1209 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-star.wav synth 0.1 sine 941 sine 1336 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-pound.wav synth 0.1 sine 941 sine 1477 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-A.wav synth 0.1 sine 697 sine 1633 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-B.wav synth 0.1 sine 770 sine 1633 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-C.wav synth 0.1 sine 852 sine 1633 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-D.wav synth 0.1 sine 941 sine 1633 channels 1

      sox -n dtmf-us-busy.wav synth 10 sine 480 sine 620 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-rbt-US.wav synth 10 sine 440 sine 480 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-uk-us-dialtone.wav synth 11 sine 350 sine 440 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-uk-busy.wav synth 10 sine 400 channels 1 # needs cadence
      sox -n dtmf-uk-ringback synth 10 sine 400 sine 450 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-eur-dialtone.wav synth 10 sine 425 channels 1
      sox -n dtmf-eur-busy.wav synth 10 sine 425 channels 1 # needs cadence
      sox -n dtmf-eur-ringback.wav synth 10 sine 425 channels 1 # needs cadence

I had forgotten about those! I had a phreaking program[1] with those on the C-64. They called the DTMF utility 'Silver Box.'

Turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_box

[1] It was this one: https://commodore.software/images/jdownloads/screenshots/tel...

Where I'm from we used pulse dialing. I remember being so proud of myself for figuring out that the number of pulses the phone sent represented the digit you're dialing.

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635144

The legend says that there were people who could whistle the handshake and the receiving modem would understand it.

Getting a 300 baud Bell 100 modem to detect carrier and stay connected for a bit via whistling isn't too hard.

Fun to see this here! I have this as a poster. It came with the Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli back in the day.

I highly recommend browsing the rest of the site too. Oona (windytan) has tons of interesting experiments and projects there.

I think it sounded a little bit different in Europe. Maybe a different one of the negotiated standards were used here?

FYI I am pretty sure the author is in Finland.

She is, but in the graphic it is written that the number being dialed is in the Pennsylvania.

Is there an audio recording of "modern" handshakes somewhere?

Things no longer work this way. Old skool modems took advantage of existing lines designed for voice, so the tones were somewhat audible. Now, it's pretty much an ethernet connection straight to your house (a gross over simplification), but modern connections to ISPs are no longer the same.

But if they could make grandma marvel at the sound of two blackholes merging by transposing a faint gravitational wave to sound, I suppose we could amaze grandma by taking some kind of wavy view of the digital signal while someone load the picture of a cute girl's black hole.

Please don't do this here.

Underneath the Ethernet layer there is still an old skool layer of modulation over a copper wire (unless you have fibre to your premises or are on wireless).

It's not that far removed from the old 56k modems. The main difference is that VDSL uses multiple carriers at different frequencies, but each individual carrier bears some resemblance to a 56k modem. VDSL is basically 10000 old skool modems running in parallel. It's no coincidence that the VDSL tone spacing is about 4kHz, or the bandwidth of a phone line. Your "voice phone line" is just carrier #0.

Also VDSL uses some very sophisticated channel modelling, whereby it measures the coupling between your copper wire and all the other copper wires in a bundle of telephone wires and cancels the interference out. This allows it to send carriers down the wire at frequencies that were previously unusable. It's basically a beefed up version of the 56k training, taking advantage of today's computers running faster and being able to run a more complex channel model/estimator in real time.

As a whole the VDSL signal is mostly on ultrasonic carriers, but it would be possible to tune into one of the carriers and listen to it. (Interesting project anyone?)

ADSL/VDSL uses phone lines but operate in the hundred kilohertz to several megahertz range, so all the sounds are ultrasonic. Still, it would be nice to see the recordings and plot them visually in a spectrogram. DOCSIS uses many megahertz of bandwidth too, and similarly you can't hear stuff but it would be interesting to see a spectrogram.

I think I need to order one of the posters of this.

Brings back fond memories of Diablo and warcraft.

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