The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound

I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but the old Apple floppy drives were pretty nice. (You could tell if your program was loading properly by listening, a skill I used right up until hard drives got too quiet.) I remember being jealous of my friend whose Apple //c drive sounded nicer than my Apple ][e :)

I think the sounds we remember most strongly are the ones that played when we were anticipating... modem sounds, floppy loading sounds, the part of vinyl records before the music, etc.

At the Vintage Computer Festival one year I set up a PDP-8/M running FOCAL-8 connected to an ASR-33 teletype. To load the program you keyed in a boot loader sequence, a really trivial one, and then loaded the real boot loader off paper tape, then loaded FOCAL off of paper tape.

One of the really humorous things was the sound that a teletype makes, when reading paper tape or typing out listings at 10 characters per second, has been so immortalized in early movies as the sound a 'computer' makes that people would be drawn to the sound, having never actually seen a Teletype in the flesh before!

The rhythmic -- almost hypnotic -- screek screek of a dot-matrix printer.

By far, the sound of ZX Spectrum's games loading back in 1982 , when I was a kid, is definitely the greatest and most favourite digital sound of my whole life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6uwfM8F5uU

Saving or reading data on cassette on a Trash 80 (that's TRS 80 for you young'uns). Waiting five minutes for those 80 lines of BASIC to load.

For me, it's also the sound of modems, here's a small story explaining my personal connection to these modem sounds.

In the 90s I used to get my emails from BBSs and frequently the first thing I did after waking up was to boot up the PC and make it call the (at those times usually busy) BBS. While taking a shower, brushing teeth, getting dressed etc... there was this long chain of

Pick-up, Dialtone, Dialing, Busy... Wait. Pickup, DIaltone, Dialing, Busy... Wait. Pickup, Dialtone, Dialing, Busy...

until finally, maybe after 10-15 minutes it would connect, so I could sit down on the computer and check for new emails. Then there was the 2nd call to upload replies to the BBS... This was daily routine for a few years!

I still own the trusty Telebit T2500 and a USR Courier, I think I'll have to put them up my small Server/NAS just for the fun of being able to dial in and fetch my emails, maybe with an android-phone? ;-)

There are lots of sounds I definitely won't miss. Such as the high-pitched targeted whine of a CRT or a magnetic disk drive, or the excessively loud whirr of an optical drive.

One thing that I find interesting, although I'm not sure whether I will miss it or not, is how the dial tone is going away. With modern phones you never hear the dial tone, you only start hearing the call when it's dialing.

Most memorable is the 1200 baud DTMF of my setup dialing to the local packet gateway. They're still around, though. The spinning/stopping of the C64 cassette drive. And the head of a floppy drive seeking sectors, one developed a cunning sense (from trauma) to tell from the sound whether a failure was about to happen.

A dialling modem is my favourite, followed closely by the dot-matrix printer. My dear mother used to create multi-page decorative banners for our birthdays and print them with the old dot-matrix printer. We'd colour the banners by hand with smelly markers or crayons.

"favourite sound of old that's no longer common"

Stepper motors in fast dot matrix printers (such as the Okidata 2410) and in phototypesetters (such as the Itek Quadritek)

Rewinding a tape cassette.

The sound of the tone arm retracting at the end of a record on an automatic turntable.

> what was your favourite sound of old that's no longer common?

The speak and spell. Boogie boogie.

>I'm kind of sad that my daughter won't know what a dial up modem sounds like.

Heh, why? Do you feel like you're missing out on life because you've never had to use a telegraph ? It'll definitely be very cool to show her how it used to be, but that's likely the extent of it :)

Error writing /dev/lp0 (on fire, eh?)

Modem sounds were totally useful for troubleshooting. You'd know if your modem dialed someone's voice line, or answering machine, or a fax machine, or a busy signal, or "number not in service", or if it just rang with nothing answering, or if someone was already using the line for a voice call, or blessedly if it hooked up with an actual modem on the other end. You could also hear interruptions from someone else picking up a phone on the line or from call waiting; not all modem hardware would do it, but the relay on mine would audibly pulse.

The sounds of the actual connection weren't all that useful, but did at least indicate the negotiated speed between the modems (28800 and up does the kabing-kabing sound, 14400 and lower doesn't). So you'd know quickly if you hit a slow node on your BBS or AOL.

For what its worth, you definitely could identify the data rate before windows would report it. I used to listen and when I heard it connect at 26400, Id disconnect and retry until I heard and saw 33.6 or better. Not all of those trunklines were created equal back then.

It was totally useful for debugging. In addition to connection speed, you could also tell if your desired protocol was accepted by the computer you called. If it didn't support ZMODEM you could tell immediately by the sound of the test packets, and you wouldn't waste your time on a slow-protocol connection. That mattered when you had precious few hours in the middle of the night to download important stuff.

It was useful when you were expecting a data call and you hear your aunt on the other end saying HELLO? WHAT IS THIS BEEPING? HELLO?

What? It's useful for "debugging" alright.

Is it really a machine or a person just picked up at the other side?

Are we getting a busy signal or something else?

Is the ISP really not picking up the phone?

Also, I used it once to dial to a really busy number. Automatic dial, busy, retrial, when the call went through I just picked up the phone.

It was extremely useful for debugging. You could tell if you dialed the wrong number. You could tell if it was having trouble handshaking due to noise on the line. You could tell if the modem on the other side was slower than you expected.

Even non-technical users would get used to a certain sequence and could tell if things changed suddenly.

It made the user feel like something beyond their mere mortal understanding was happening.