
The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012) - bpierre
http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html
======
krylon
I get waves of nostalgia when I hear that screeching sound.

At work, when the fax machine was still sitting in my office, I deliberately
turned the sound on (for those who don't know: the initial handshake part
sounds pretty much the same for modems and fax). Then we got a shiny new
printer/scanner/fax that now sits in the hallway.

When I had Internet access for the first time (1996), I used a 14.4 modem for
about a year, before I could switch to ISDN. To me, sound always signified a
window opening to a new, magical world, where the only boundaries were your
imagination and available bandwidth.

A friend of mine once dialed the wrong number, and a human picked up. Hearing
a human voice from the modem was really strange.

Ah, good times (except for the crappy bandwidth and the fact that the phone
company charged by the minute).

~~~
Cthulhu_
It was when Going Online was still a ritual, just like starting up the
computer was - it took a while, sometimes you had to go through a menu or
start up Windows or whatever separately still, you got this jingle when
starting up, sometimes a login screen, all that stuff. Then going online,
dialing up, telling the family (if any) that you're using the internet for a
while, firing up the browser, etc. Using the internet was (for most people
anyway) a very focused task too, given the per minute charge - get online, do
what you want, get offline again.

I noticed that myself very quickly after getting DSL; while we had a bandwidth
limit (1500 MB / month iirc), I still spent a lot of time online; freed from
pay per minute, you get a lot more time to just browse and explore. Still do
the latter. Usually it's browsing Reddit, but sometimes I fall into a rabbit
hole.

~~~
barrkel
Trumpet Winsock; login and initiate PPP; fire up Netscape Navigator.

~~~
bringtheaction
Never heard of Trumpet Winsock before. Found this.

[https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/](https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/)

[http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/news/3-latest-
news/17-ma...](http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/news/3-latest-
news/17-mar-2011.html)

> As a result of some recent discussion about Trumpet Winsock and its use
> during the early 1990s, a group of users at Hacker News have decided to
> donate to Peter Tattam in appreciation for their use of Trumpet Winsock
> during the early years of the Internet.

> As a gesture of good will, Peter Tattam, the sole copyright owner of Trumpet
> Winsock, has also issued an amnesty on any copyright infringement by all
> users (individual and corporate) of Trumpet Winsock indefinitely for use
> prior to Jan 2011. He does however reserve all other rights in the copyright
> of Trumpet Winsock. Please note that Trumpet Winsock is still available for
> sale and is NOT free - should you wish to continue to use it, you should
> order a registration key from us.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> Never heard of Trumpet Winsock before.

That sound you just heard was half of HN sighing at how old they feel,
including me. :/

~~~
twic
I'd heard of it, but never used it. The reason being that we were an Apple
household, and so used MacPPP!

------
sillysaurus3
BTW, every post from this blog is amazing. See the two recent ones:

[http://www.windytan.com/2017/09/descrambling-split-band-
voic...](http://www.windytan.com/2017/09/descrambling-split-band-voice-
inversion.html) "Voice inversion is a primitive method of rendering speech
unintelligible to prevent eavesdropping of radio or telephone calls."

[http://www.windytan.com/2017/07/virtual-music-
box.html](http://www.windytan.com/2017/07/virtual-music-box.html) "A little
music project I was writing required a melody be played on a music box.
However, the paper-programmable music box I had (pictured) could only play
notes on the C major scale. I couldn't easily find a realistic-sounding
synthesizer version. [...] Perhaps, if I digitized the sound myself, I could
build a flexible virtual instrument to generate just the perfect sample for
the piece!"

My favorite is "Mystery signal from a helicopter"
[http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-
helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-
helicopter.html)

~~~
JorgeGT
If I remember correctly from the last time she also has a great post about
decoding RF bus stop signals. Super useful for a home assistant!

------
ceautery
I remember reading this when it came out, and it was fascinating, especially
considering listening to modems to diagnose problems is how I made my bones in
tech support back when CompuServe was still a thing.

I'm an old timer, and have even used a 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler
that the article referred to. I listened to the evolution of modem handshakes,
and had no idea what parts meant what, but over the years I correlated
different problems to different sounds, and through osmosis learned the
various AT commands for different chip manufacturers (the main three I ran
across were Hayes/Rockwell, USR, and Motorola) to lock them in certain modes -
set the flow control mode (RTS/CTS or X-on/X-off), set the max and min baud
rates, and set various error control algorithm modes.

Doing tech support for a couple years in the 90s, the biggest problem I saw
(beyond the fact that average users were pretty unsophisticated back then),
was the quality of telephone lines in certain areas of the country. If you
live in the sticks, you're screwed and lucky to achieve 9600 baud with any
consistency. If you live in larger cities with crumbling infrastructure,
you're likely to have some "signal bleed" (not sure what to call it) where
other conversations are faintly audible on your lines. In both of these cases,
the negotiation sequence would restart several times, sometimes getting lucky
and connecting, but more often failing until we found the right AT commands to
lock a lower baud rate and force error correction - MNP? I think that was the
magic bullet in most cases.

In the end, the phone infrastructure improved greatly just about everywhere,
but by then it didn't matter as much, as people started moving to cable
modems, typically plugged directly into a desktop computer, running Win 95 and
getting hijacked by 0 day exploits to build the first botnets. Good times.

Anyway, I'm glad to see this article has held up over time and people still
find it interesting.

~~~
gugagore
what you call "signal bleed" is usually called "crosstalk":
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Crosstalk](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Crosstalk)

------
combatentropy

      > Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask. [...]
      > Even then, the idea of not hearing what's happening
      > on a phone line you're calling on was quite new,
      > and modems would default to exposing the user to the handshake audio. [...]
      > 
      > All you had to do to silence the handshake was to send the command ATM0
      > down the serial line before dialing.
    

And I think the user was comforted by the ritual, as far as I can tell from
conversations with my friends and scenes from pop culture like _You 've Got
Mail_.

I am for using the computer's own low-level apparatus as progress bars,
instead of the opaque logos or polished animated graphics, blocking the view
like a royal guard. For example, I wish my laptop and my phone listed the
shell's output during boot, like some Linux distros still do. Even though most
users wouldn't fully understand it --- and I have to admit that even I don't
understand a lot of it --- the quickly scrolling text is no worse than an
animated spinner in conveying, "Loading..."

I think most users, and I mean nontechnical, are okay with the exposure and
even kind of like it. It makes them feel like they're in a spy movie. Some
will never try to understand it and will just take it as a more-detailed
progress spinner. Some will slowly become familiar with some of the lines,
google them out of curiosity, and it may be the spark that lights them down
the long trek to becoming a programmer. Isn't that one of our country's goals,
to encourage kids to become programmers?

Anyway, my point is, I came to programming from graphic design and front-end.
I spend a lot of time thinking about user-interface design. But maybe I'm
against the grain in wanting some of the architecture to be allowed to hang
out. (Does that make me a Brutalist?)

~~~
dfox
I'm completely with you on this, but there is one issue: many hardware
platforms are simply incapable to show such scrolling text (or dump it into
UART) fast enough in the early boot stages which is the reason why you don't
today get that even on server-oriented distributions.

Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages
that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to
users with this approach to computing.

~~~
estebank
> Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking
> messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to
> cater to users with this approach to computing.

"Reticulating splines"

~~~
dfox
Maxis' games (ie. "Reticulating splines", but SimCity 4 does that to) and KSP
also comes to mind for this, but in these cases the messages are obvious
nonsense, which is not the case for KDE.

------
danparsonson
Classic article! I would also like to recommend
[http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-
helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-
helicopter.html) \- Oona is clearly a talented engineer :-)

------
muxator
3d spectrogram:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c)

Animation of the picture illustrated in this article:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo)

If you live with someone >= 30, turn up the volume and wait for him/her to
appear at the door for a nostalgia moment...

~~~
the_cat_kittles
shot in the dark- that looks like a good way to visualize a bunch of
timeseries lines, do you know what they are using for that graph?

~~~
jerrre
In the description there is "ozone 5"

Which refers to iZotope Ozone, that audio mastering software. Normally you
would put in one or two timeseries (that is a mono or stereo audio file where
the y axis is amplitude).

In this case the audio is mono, and you're looking at a short time fourier
transformation (STFT) with the parameters as in the description, where the
height is de magnitude of the frequency bins, and the Y axis (from right to
left in the video) is frequencies from low to high, in logarithmic scale as is
standard in audio.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3G2eHEnt7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3G2eHEnt7c)
here it is used on some music

------
logfromblammo
Manually decoding the DTMF in the spectrogram gives me 1-570-234-0003, which
turns up a lot of search hits.

------
DarronWyke
This also takes me back to watching some modems have bad implementations of
the USR protocols. Some were so bad that they'd actually watch the packet
traffic for commands. I remember seeing people getting knocked offline from
someone typing ATH0++ over IRC (all plaintext!), and their modem catching it
as an actual USR command (the Attention-Hang Up command).

------
nautilus12
This would be more elucidative if they had the sound and a moving bar
superimposed over the image so I dont have to go back and forth.

~~~
digi_owl
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo)

~~~
nautilus12
Thanks!

------
lostboys67
I can remember at my first job (which was a long way away from the Exchange /
central office).

The carrier signal was a little weak and I had to whistle the correct tone
down the line to get the other end to pickup :-)

We also when we had a project that used modems for remote data collection our
electronics shop modified (technically illegal) the modems with adjustable
gain

------
twic
I'd love to see something similar for ADSL. There's no audible part to ADSL,
but there are still two modems talking to each other, and from what i
understand of it, there's a rich and interesting process involved in setting
up the line - tone ordering and so on.

~~~
digi_owl
DSL is by design placed outside the human auditory range (also why it has such
limited range between home and exchange). As such, you are better off thinking
about it like the analog part of most any wired network.

ISDN by contrast puts a digital signal where the PSTN analog signal normally
is (iirc).

~~~
twic
ADSL still pretty different to something like Ethernet - not that i understand
Ethernet terribly well either. Ethernet is baseband: it really is a digital
on-off signal, with Manchester encoding, 8/10 encoding, 64/66 encoding, etc.
ADSL is broadband: there is modulation into phase and frequency patterns.

Mind you, 8/10 encoding is amazing as well, and a good explanation of that
would be well worth a read for this audience!

------
aequitas
I always wondered if it would be feasible to setup a modem connection
wireless. In a way that you would have a loudspeaker and microphone at each
end of a field and just transmit the noises through the air.

~~~
theWheez
I actually experimented with this using ultrasonic signals (most people can't
hear above ~16-17kHz), and with very simple modulation was able to transfer
~30bps. Was a very fun proof of concept, using just a cell phone and a
speaker! I think the idea is great and there are many applications for it.

In this one I embedded the signal into a song, and then the phones would parse
the modulated data to all synchronize together and create an ad hoc light show
with the flashlights!

~~~
tonyarkles
Sigh... you're making me want to put together a laptop/mobile version of
PSK-31[1], just to see if I can do it.

[1] [http://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-
radio/operating-...](http://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-
radio/operating-your-new-station/psk31-work-the-world-with-low-power/)

------
scoot
Click "past" under the article title for previous discussions.

Lots of fascinating content in that blog!

------
jszymborski
Oona is definitely a personal hero of mine.

------
breakingcups
Heh, I remember the sound over here (The Netherlands) sounding just slightly
different. Probably differences in negotiation? Amazing what nuances the brain
can pickup when exposed to something often enough.

~~~
isoprophlex
We went to 56k6 or 28k8 baud almost immediately. Other places of the world
were stuck with much slower baudrates for longer. Maybe that made the
difference?

Or it's just the acoustics of older, crappier speakers

------
jjawssd
I never understood why in the United States getting 56k was impossible. It was
always slightly less than that. Meanwhile in Europe I easily obtained 56k
negotiation.

~~~
ptaipale
There was a FCC regulation limiting the transmission power sent on the line;
this regulation did not exist elsewhere. It limited the speed to 53.3 kbit/s.

------
krallja
(2012)

------
dzhiurgis
I was hoping something more like this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdgvceSBroU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdgvceSBroU)

------
kuharich
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514)

------
gexla
The noisiest part of the process in our house was the constant dialing to get
onto AOL followed by the busy signal. Most fun when I was trying to sleep in.

------
rando444
Previous conversation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514)

------
outworlder
Pretty sure that the sample handshake available in the article is not for a
56k negotiation.

My ears are saying that it sounds more like a 14.4k negotiation.

------
LordKano
Mmmmmmm. BBS glory days. Sometimes, I miss that era.

I could tell the speed of the connection by the sound of the handshake.

------
enknamel
I always wanted to know this. But by the time I was old enough to understand
it, dialup was out of my life.

------
GrumpyNl
Those were the days you could hack a mainframe with a cassette player. Boy did
we have fun with that.

------
rogerweissman77
That sound brings back so many memories. BACKNEXT

------
cbar_tx
that's crazy. I was just looking at this the other day and used the sound clip
to make an annoying ringtone for my phone

------
skellertor
Very intersting glimpse into our past and DTMF.

------
HenryBemis
You see an interesing article.

I see a new ringtone :)

~~~
jlgaddis
[http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3](http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3)

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
this sound will make an awesome voicemail announcement.

------
anst
Stranger Things.

