Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)

goughlui.com

107 pointsfmakunbound44 comments

Use the power of Linux and minimodem to hear modem sounds... And transmit a file — wirelessly! The future is now!

Sender:

    $ cat /etc/passwd | minimodem --tx 300

Receiver:

    $ minimodem --rx 300

LOL it's amazing that we've invented all this stuff and yet never just let our computers talk to each other without a wifi card or a phone or whatever else. We just needed a speaker and a microphone the whole time.

How long before someone makes a phone app to just let two phones talk to each other to transmit a file? No, I don't care about your network, just let me access the speaker & microphone and beep at each other a little bit...

We used to use acoustic couplers to allow computers to talk using a handset, back when Ma Bell didn't allow you to plug directly into the phone line.

Yeah, I remember them. But somehow we never let computers just talk to each other via sound, directly. Like humans do.

One could even play tunes using this by varying the baud-rate and the sleep length.

  #!/bin/bash
  
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 2400 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 2400 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 3600 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 3600 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 4000 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 4000 & sleep 0.25; pkill minimodem
  cat /dev/zero | minimodem --tx 3600 & sleep 0.5; pkill minimodem

Sorry it is out of tune, was just a quick try.

It's apparently a college project in some Signal Processing classes to implement a modem over speaker/microphone from first principles.

The way I heard it, the higher the bitrate, the better the grade.

The DLP team did not anticipate this. ;)

In college I had a 300 baud connection to a school PDP-11, with a phone handset coupler. The modem dropped the connection constantly so the handshake connect was constant. And those sounds were increasingly annoying. You whippersnappers with your always on internet have no idea how tough it was for us brave pioneers.

Hey, I resent that! I built my own 300 baud modem from parts I got from a dumpster, more or less guessing my way through the circuit for lack of documentatino. It worked, it had lots of blinking LEDs, a sturdy plywood box with a mass of switches which made it look like an ICBM launch console but it did get me online with my Commodore-64. Initially I had to dial by hand using a rotary phone, later I made a pulse-dial circuit and program so I could do some war-dialing - at 300 baud. On a shared phone line in a student house, with one of those pulse counters which clonked loudly when another quarter was added to the phone bill. At night. Boy, did they support my late-night hobbies...

300 baud modems used frequency shift keying, meaning they generated two different sounds for 0 and 1 bits. The sound frequencies were high enough that the receiving modem didn't need a full 1/300 of a second to decide if it was getting a 0 or a 1. Based on that, if you had a good phone connection it was possible to reconfigure the UARTs on both ends to operate at 450 baud instead of 300. This gave you a 50% increase in speed!

I was able to do this with my C64, reducing the amount of time (cracked) games took to download, and reduced the upset my mom had about me being on the phone all the time.

First computer exposure for me was phone coupler 300-baud modem on a paper terminal to compuserve billed by the hour (was it minute? or hour? I think rounded to hour)

Eventually got a tiny green-screen terminal and discovered I could record the modem sessions on a tape player and play them back offline sometimes!

When TRS-80 came out and then 1200baud modems I thought the future was amazing.

Also relevant: https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-picture...

One of my first tech jobs as a teenager in high school involved a lot of resetting ATI modems connected to portmasters as they oveheated at an isp in the mid 90s. Recently used a related one as a sample in a song for a friend about that era. Three sounds you won't hear today that defined the early 90s for us, a zippo lighter, an x.25 dialup number, and a 1200baud modem handshake (though may have used 300 for the sample), and then a simple triangle wave. was called "requiem for a hacker." I still can't believe the shit we did when we were kids.

OMG. Livingston Portmasters. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.

- fellow ISP modem lackey (but USR Couriers, not shit ATI, thank God)

Mr. Fancy Pants USR Courier over here! One isp I worked at took the couriers out of their cases and put the boards in custom racks with fans blowing over them and added custom power supplies. Those ATI things were a fire hazard. Violating warranties on USR was much more stable. This was before anyone could afford Ascend(hah!) gear with PRI cards. I was the least compentent sort of tag along to some really great technical minds at the time, but in a sense I think that just made me the luckiest. Racks and racks of blinkenlights in underground bunkers, it was unbelievable to see it all at the time. :)

Listening to some of those sure brings back some memories. The best part is [click]hey can I use the phone now?[click] connection lost

Once I took a microphone, plugged it into my ZX Spectrum's tape input, did LOAD "" and was able to successfully screech a valid header into it. It said Program: and a bunch of random chars, but nevertheless, the machine stood by flashing its borders in awe hoping to receive the rest of the code. Ohayo gozaimasu.

Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends?

Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.

In the US reaching 56k was not possible. Sending at 56k required transmit levels above those allowed by the FCC. The maximum in the US over a perfect line was 53.3k. During that era I had a dedicated dual channel 128k ISDN connect at home provided by my work but while traveling I would occasionally get a 53.3k connection but 48k was more normal.

Owned an ISP. When we started we used USR Sportsters at 28.8k then flashed these up to support 33.6k. They were hooked up to Portmaster 2's.

As we went digital we used PM3's. I saw some 53k connections but it wasn't very common. Most common was 48k to 50k.

The PM2's were an amazing machine. We never had an issue with them in years of service. The PM3's were buggy until the later years. Eventually the firmware got good and they were very reliable. Rocky start though.

The ISPs I worked at used PM2s with "racks" of Sportsters mounted on wood or shelves. I remember many melted cases.

Later on a place I worked at used old PM2s to run serial consoles. The things used a lot of space, naturally.

We had ours on retail wire shelving, there was plenty of room and airflow. We used the PM2's as reverse consoles after we went digital too. Thank god we rarely had to use them. But they sure were reliable. I had many PM2's with 1000+ day uptimes.

I vaguely recall my family treating the link coming up at any less than 48k as a "hang up and try again" situation (possibly dialing into a different local access number). We did once move into a rental house where we couldn't get better than maybe 28k or 36k, but after a technician came out and swapped which pair of wires we were connecting through we had a much more stable connection that I think was operating at 56k more often than not.

Oh man this brings back memories of doing tech support back in the day. All those calls of people complaining about "slow speeds" we'd adjust the modem init string to report the port speed rather than the actual connection speed and people were so happy to see that 56k number.

In Brazil it was very common to use dial up until early 2000's. Connecting at 56k was usual.

56kbps was the theoretical upper limit download speed (at the expense of upload speed since the maximum duplex bandwidth was 64kbps) for 56k modems. Even in very good conditions these connections rarely broke 50kbps.

The max I ever saw with V.90 or V.92 over years of business travel in North America was about 47kbps. The mean was more like about 38kpbs.

The only time I was ever able to connect with anything close to a 56k connection was when my phone lines were upgraded to support ISDN and I’d have to make an old-school modem to modem call.

I remember speeds usually being 40+ kbit in Russia. On the rare occasion when I got anything slower than 40 I just disconnected and tried again.

> hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed

Didn't it show a bubble thing from that icon when you connected saying "WebPlus is connected, your speed is XX kbit/s"?

We had 56k until we upgraded to ADSL in 2003, I'm from Denmark.

I used to hate that screeching noise so much I cut the wire to the internal speaker of my first modem (1200 baud)

For subsequent modems (speed upgrades) I had learned the about Hayes AT command set and init script would mute the internal speaker for peace of mind.

Personally for me, this modem noise is as bad as fingernails screeching down a blackboard!

I always kept the speaker on at low volume. After the initial connection was established, it just sounded like background/white noise. I could tell how good the connection was, the general speed, and of course could hear other things like incoming call waiting.

Little me kinda liked that sound — it meant I was going online!

Though I kept wondering how is it that when you pick up the phone while downloading something you just hear seemingly random constant static, yet somehow the computer decoded that into useful things. And how you were able to download multiple files from different places simultaneously over a single phone line. It felt a bit like magic. It was much later that I learned about the packet-switched nature of the internet.

The use of stereo in the recording is really lovely. Listen with headphones if you can.

Remember the nightmare of soft modems? They were a combined audio and modem sharing the same DSP chipset. They were terrible and shipped with a lot of PCs. I think they finally worked out the kinks when cable modems and DSL became an option.

There were also a neat series of adapters starting in the late 90s that were combined modems with telephone line loop nics. All the NICs plugged into the same telephone line would see each other on the network. Windows had an option to share Internet connection and even autoconnect a modem when another PC needed an internet connection.

These are cool, but most all of this happened after I had transitioned over to DSL, so it doesn't really tickle my nostalgia. The quintessential modem sounds to me will always be V.32, V.32bis, and TPEP.

We had a bank of dial-ins to the college back in the 90's. I loved the old US Robotics equipment.

I use a modem sound file for my wake up sound. It gets you out of bed mighty quickly.

The university I went to still had a modem bank around 2007. Pretty wild.

see also, vintage telephone system sounds:

https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/modern-north-ame...

https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/vintage-telephon...

To get an easy boot of nostalgia, once can listen to early 90s hard drive sound as well. I got one recently starting a classic Mac. Very nice feeling.

Wow, this is a blast from the past. I played most of the wav files on this site and I think they're really neat.

reminds me of this... http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/98dec/19981231...

The coolest aisle at Office Max in the 90s was the wall of modems

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