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weswilson

The sound of dial-up explained:

https://oona.windytan.com/posters/dialup-final.png

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

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Bret Victor's interactive version of this in Dynamicland:

https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/977058412990152704

I pity the youngsters who will never be able to mentally playback the dialup sound.

Same here! I played it in my mind while looking at the picture. Wow, we're so old school!

I grew up after that sound, but I can mentally play back a dialup sound purely because it is used in every second show, podcast, documentary on computers.

I still remember the small adrenaline rush we had as soon as we would detect the tone for a successful connection.

That instant was unique for human-tech interaction. Perhaps comparable with becoming positively viral, but at small scale.

I remember installing Mandrake Linux on my PC (via CD ordered online as magazines still hadn't started to include the CDs). I had the dial-up line and the modem but didn't know how to set it up as I was new to both Linux and dial-up. So I used to print the steps from websites/mail groups at office to try them at home. Initially I couldn't make it work and had no choice but to wait to get to office the next day to start again.

Finally I read a bunch of docs about how to talk to the modem and eventually I managed to do the correct steps and the modem produced its sweet handshake tone and the indicator lights started to blink - it was such a pure joy to finally be online from Linux!

I wonder what the equivalent sound is now?

The opposite, connections that drop or slow down, the sound of music that is buffering or got automatically downgraded to the worst available quality.

Not sound, but visual: The moment the video stream goes from blurry to crisp.

"This was back when chatbots weren't actually intelligent and used to spout out random nonsense"

There is still a lot of emblematic sounds, the skype calling sound, netflix loud bang bang, the iMessage or messenger notification pop sound, etc.

But there are all from company sound design and the same experience as the dial up sound.

reminds me of two 17-year-olds attempt at using a rotary phone (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok

The animated video that explains this is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

On that topic. I never understood why the initiation needed to be audible, but afterwards the connection was silent.

It kept the speaker on at first so you could hear if a human answered the phone, or got some network message like "all circuits are busy". It muted once it had a confirmed modem on the other end.

You can hear all the post-handshake data sounds by adding &M2 to your modem script, or &M0 to mute the handshake too.

it doesn't have to be, ATM you could turn it off, or ATL you could control how loud it was

There is no need. Speakers could be disabled.

It used to be useful to me back when my ISP had 28800 bps and 33600 bps capable modems in their pool, and I had a 33600 -- I learned to hear from the handshake when I hit one of the slower modems and would then immediately hang up and try again until I got one of the fast ones ;)

It was pretty useful in my experience because sometimes the line you called was busy, sometimes a human answered instead of a computer, and sometimes a computer modem just didn’t pick up for whatever reason. Hearing the dial & handshake was a way to know what exactly went wrong when you weren’t able to connect. BBSs didn’t have this problem so much, but it happened often enough when modeming with friends or with small businesses that didn’t have a large modem bank and a lot of lines. Typing the wrong number was common. I also remember experimenting with robo-dialing with my childhood friends, calling through a list of numbers, like in War Games, looking for unknown computers to connect to.

You could turn it on by sending the correct Hayes command before connecting. It's really annoying! And it can't be turned back off again until you disconnect.

Is it just me or... does the modem audibly say "Hi" when the connection is successful? Probably just me projecting from my imagination, but listen to the part after the handshaking and before the white-noise dataflow. There's a very clear 'boing-boing' sound and then a bunch of static that sort-of sounds like someone whispering the word "Hi". It's not just on the linked recording above, I remember being conscious of this back in the day when dial-up was "normal". Just curious to know if anyone else encountered this trick of perception...

Anyway, hearing those tones again did bring back all the feels, the joy of hearing that "boing-boing-Hi" greeting as I stepped once again onto the "Information Superhighway".

That would make a good poster.

It was actually distributed as a poster along with the 2014.2 issue of the Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli.

The author does sell it as a poster here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/windytan/works/31262230-the...

I'm actually surprised the link, company, and poster are all still valid/working 10 years later.

Never forget :')

Eternal September

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