
The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol' Dial-Up Modem Sound - ColinWright
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-and-meaning-of-that-ol-dial-up-modem-sound/257816/
======
iuguy
The Dial-up modem sound is something that an entire generation will grow up
today having never heard. In fact, there's probably a fair few HN'ers who've
never heard it.

These sounds are normally lost forever, like the sound of a valve radio as
it's valves warm up, or the sound of a vinyl record playing before or after
the song.

I'd like to ask HN'ers out there, what was your favourite sound of old that's
no longer common?

~~~
sp332
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.

~~~
Karunamon
Speak for yourself, that horrid buzzing noise when a disk was formatted or
having read problems haunted my nightmares as a child.

"Aw nuts, gotta format a disk.. okay.. key in the command.." _book it from the
room at high speed_

 _BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ_

"Whew, made it out safe"

~~~
StavrosK
Semi-related: One of my NAS disks had, for the past few months, made a
horrible high-pitched noise every so often that kept rising in intensity and
ended in a screeching halt, as from nails on a blackboard.

Today, I saw a RAID warning that a drive had died. I replaced it in a hurry,
as an SSD died yesterday on my main computer and I didn't want to wait around
for disaster to strike a third time, and booted the NAS up and waited for the
array to resync.

Relieved, I thought "well, at least I'll never hear that horrible screeching
sound again, now that the drive finally failed."

Half way through the thought, I hear a familiar "nnnnnnnnnggggggg"...

I still have no idea which disk is doing that, or how long it will last.

~~~
jrabone
It's probably thermal calibration; I had a couple of IBM 10K SCSI disks that
used to do that every so often. It sounds like delicate electronics in pain...
They lasted for years.

You might be able to get more information from querying the SMART parameters
for each drive.

~~~
StavrosK
Huh, that's weird. It sounds like they're in agony. SMART indeed reports
nothing out of the ordinary, I checked...

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jaylevitt
And then there was the Commodore 1670, a 300/1200 bps modem with auto-answer.
Not only "with" auto-answer; with auto-answer on by DEFAULT, with settings in
RAM, and with a computer that you restarted by hitting the power switch. In an
era when most people had only one phone line.

A critical Commodore skill was the ability to respond to the 1670's answer
tone by whistling a 300 baud originator tone, so the 1670 would "detect"
carrier, then "detect" carrier drop and hang up the line. So you could talk.

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ColinWright
I remember putting a de-tuned AM radio next to my TRS-80 to listen to the
program's progress. I was using various algorithms to factor integers,
primarily Pollard Rho, and I could tell when it was stepping and when it was
GCDing by the different sounds coming from the radio. I could estimate the
sizes of the numbers by the pitch, and generally make sure things were working
properly.

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JonnieCache
A couple of videos for us all to enjoy this saturday morn:

The Truth About Your Modem: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2j_hXHEjX4>

The Phantom of the Floppera: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pqxyhrN8Cc>

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bunderbunder
Now I'm nostalgic for when I used to be able to listen and tell what speed the
connection was going to be. And sad now that I've realized that I can't
remember what 300 baud sounds like anymore.

------
ajtaylor
I'm kind of sad that my daughter won't know what a dial up modem sounds like.
I can imagine the conversations now: "This is how we used to get on the
internet. Can you hear those tones? That is one computer talking to another."
"What, you didn't have wireless? And you had to plug your computer into the
phone line? Wow Dad, you're old!"

~~~
GuiA
>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 :)

~~~
ajtaylor
Let's just call it nostalgia. :)

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rmason
Most hams under fifty have never heard a peculiar style of sending morse code
using a bug

[http://pages.suddenlink.net/wa5bdu/Vibroplex----Angle---
web....](http://pages.suddenlink.net/wa5bdu/Vibroplex----Angle---web.jpg)

known as a banana boat swing.

<http://w6mtc.org/pages/events.htm>

------
teeja
What, nobody mentioned line printers. Dot matrix, ha! <a href="[http://ed-
thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-cdc-512-line-printer.jpg&#...](http://ed-
thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-cdc-512-line-printer.jpg>Heres) a pix</a> of the
Control Data 512. <a href="[http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-cdc-512-line-
printer-open....](http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-cdc-512-line-printer-
open.jpg>Look) at that hardware</a> and imagine the noise it makes.

Your ears haven't lived until they've been treated to one of these puppies
printing the Gettysberg Address one word per line on greenbar. The noise of
the paper roaring out alone makes a glass booth mandatory!

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

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rw
My team made Bleeoo, a way to capture the oral history of dial-up modem
sounds.

My favorite is here:
[http://bleeoo.com/videos/31c92a10-c228-012e-7578-12313d09290...](http://bleeoo.com/videos/31c92a10-c228-012e-7578-12313d09290e)

The main site has many more.

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cnvogel
There's an anotated diagram of a V.32 (9600 bps) connect at
<http://www.3amsystems.com/wireline/hmo-v32.htm>

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drumdance
A cool song based on modem sounds:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3VzSv4ErEg>

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Aqwis
I wonder why it was necessary for consumer modems to make these sounds. It's
not really useful for debugging, so in the end it was just an annoying sound.
Yes, I know you could often turn it off, but as far as I know the sound was
always turned on by default.

~~~
spydum
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.

~~~
eclipxe
Man I remember those good times. 14400..meh....but 33.6!!! Whoo! 56k modems
were a pipe dream. We have it good these days.

~~~
spydum
I swear my practical peripherals 14.4kbps external modem was faster than my
28.8 and 33.6 at actual throughput (error correction maybe?). Never did the
56k analog.. went 128k ISDN. Having bonded channels was awesome. No cool
analog sounds on that though...

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peppertree
skrillex

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dugmartin
ATM0

