7 ms·

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 h

by iuguy 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- rmATinnovafy 14y ago
  Same with the 1541 disk drive on my old C64. I could "feel" what it was doing by the sounds coming from it.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        Huh, that's weird. It sounds like they're in agony. SMART indeed reports nothing out of the ordinary, I checked...
toemetoch 14y ago
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.
- mey 14y ago
  Got very good at listening to drive platters for that scratching noise that indicated the head was crashing and the drive needed to be replaced soon. Now my SSD is silent and I blindly sit and wait for wear leveling algorithm to fail.
  - mutagen 14y ago
    I built my last desktop to be fairly quiet, low RPM fans in the case, a power supply and video card chosen for their reputation for quiet. Unfortunately I routed the front panel audio cables next to the SATA and until I re-routed them, I had a faint, high pitched audio drive activity indicator.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
shrikant 14y ago
The rhythmic -- almost hypnotic -- screek screek of a dot-matrix printer.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Some people make music with them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU With the rise of chiptunes, I have a feeling that a lot of older sounds will be heard by the youth of today - they just won't realize what, exactly, they mean.
- planetguy 14y ago
  Or the clattering whirr of a daisy wheel... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQkbT-g3aw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQkbT-g3aw Actually pretty annoying. Though not as bad as the dot matrix.
shrub 14y ago
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.
ars 14y ago
> what was your favourite sound of old that's no longer common? The speak and spell. Boogie boogie.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckMcM 14y ago
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!
- dandrews 14y ago
  FOCAL! I spent many hours in front of a PDP-8L and ASR33 that was on loan to my smallish (at the time) university. It was my first exposure to a computer that was smaller than my apartment. 4K 12-bit words, I think it was? I just looked, and I still have a 1970 copy of DEC's "Programming Languages" manual, which contains the FOCAL language description. Thanks for the memory jog.
rwhitman 14y ago
Rewinding a tape cassette. The sound of the tone arm retracting at the end of a record on an automatic turntable.
- drumdance 14y ago
  For turntables that supported a stack of records, the sound of the next record falling onto the platter. The sound of an 8-track tape switching to the next track.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
cnvogel 14y ago
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? ;-)
InclinedPlane 14y ago
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.
StephenFalken 14y ago
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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6uwfM8F5uU
- ghostDancer 14y ago
  Yes , i was thinking about the same, those 4 minutes(more or less) to load the 48k programs and the way it sounded different when it loaded the opening screen graphics or the rest, the headless blocks and all, down to memory lane.
larrys 14y ago
"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)

by iuguy 14y ago

sp332 14y ago

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.

rmATinnovafy 14y ago
Same with the 1541 disk drive on my old C64. I could "feel" what it was doing by the sounds coming from it.
Karunamon 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      Huh, that's weird. It sounds like they're in agony. SMART indeed reports nothing out of the ordinary, I checked...

toemetoch 14y ago

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.

mey 14y ago
Got very good at listening to drive platters for that scratching noise that indicated the head was crashing and the drive needed to be replaced soon. Now my SSD is silent and I blindly sit and wait for wear leveling algorithm to fail.
- mutagen 14y ago
  I built my last desktop to be fairly quiet, low RPM fans in the case, a power supply and video card chosen for their reputation for quiet. Unfortunately I routed the front panel audio cables next to the SATA and until I re-routed them, I had a faint, high pitched audio drive activity indicator.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

shrikant 14y ago

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

pavel_lishin 14y ago
Some people make music with them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0QHY7S-OtU With the rise of chiptunes, I have a feeling that a lot of older sounds will be heard by the youth of today - they just won't realize what, exactly, they mean.
planetguy 14y ago
Or the clattering whirr of a daisy wheel... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQkbT-g3aw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVQkbT-g3aw Actually pretty annoying. Though not as bad as the dot matrix.

shrub 14y ago

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.

ars 14y ago

> what was your favourite sound of old that's no longer common? The speak and spell. Boogie boogie.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

ChuckMcM 14y ago

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!

dandrews 14y ago
FOCAL! I spent many hours in front of a PDP-8L and ASR33 that was on loan to my smallish (at the time) university. It was my first exposure to a computer that was smaller than my apartment. 4K 12-bit words, I think it was? I just looked, and I still have a 1970 copy of DEC's "Programming Languages" manual, which contains the FOCAL language description. Thanks for the memory jog.

rwhitman 14y ago

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

drumdance 14y ago
For turntables that supported a stack of records, the sound of the next record falling onto the platter. The sound of an 8-track tape switching to the next track.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cnvogel 14y ago

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? ;-)

InclinedPlane 14y ago

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.

StephenFalken 14y ago

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

ghostDancer 14y ago
Yes , i was thinking about the same, those 4 minutes(more or less) to load the 48k programs and the way it sounded different when it loaded the opening screen graphics or the rest, the headless blocks and all, down to memory lane.

larrys 14y ago

"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)