7 ms·
Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cshokie 5y agoListening to some of those sure brings back some memories. The best part is [click]hey can I use the phone now?[click] connection lost
- hirundo 5y agoIn 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.
- hagbard_c 5y agoHey, 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...
- litoE 5y ago300 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!
- thwarted 5y agoI 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.
- ck2 5y agoFirst 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.
- xattt 5y agoDid 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.
- marcodiego 5y agoIn Brazil it was very common to use dial up until early 2000's. Connecting at 56k was usual.
- danachow 5y ago56kbps 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.
- cf100clunk 5y agoThe 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.
- poizan42 5y agoWe had 56k until we upgraded to ADSL in 2003, I'm from Denmark.
- wtallis 5y agoI 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.
- 5y ago
- WillPostForFood 5y agoThe use of stereo in the recording is really lovely. Listen with headphones if you can.
- chuckdotis 5y agoWow, this is a blast from the past. I played most of the wav files on this site and I think they're really neat.
- motohagiography 5y agoOne 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.
- chrissnell 5y agoOMG. 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)
- motohagiography 5y agoMr. 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. :)
- rootusrootus 5y agoThese 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.
- protomyth 5y agoWe 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.
- danielhlockard 5y agoThe university I went to still had a modem bank around 2007. Pretty wild.
- mmerlin 5y agoI 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!
- orev 5y agoI 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.
- grishka 5y agoLittle 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.
- mmh0000 5y agoUse 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
- thedougd 5y agoThe DLP team did not anticipate this. ;)
- Natsu 5y agoLOL 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...
- AceJohnny2 5y agoIt'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.
- kaliszad 5y agoOne 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.
- thedougd 5y agoRemember 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.
- logbiscuitswave 5y agoAlso relevant: https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-picture...
- kryptonomist 5y agoTo 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.
- walrus01 5y agosee also, vintage telephone system sounds: https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/modern-north-american-telephone-sounds/att-general-error-recordings/ https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/modern-north-ame... https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/vintage-telephone-sounds/ https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/vintage-telephon...
- seabadger 5y agoreminds me of this... http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/98dec/19981231.html http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/98dec/19981231...
- blackhaz 5y agoOnce 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.
- Threeve303 5y agoThe coolest aisle at Office Max in the 90s was the wall of modems