8 ms·
The sound of the dialup, pictured
- afandian 14y agoBrilliant. This is something I have wanted to know for many years.
- jdiez17 14y agoIt's fascinating; what we would consider an ancient piece of technology performs a wide variety of tricks to overcome the optimizations done by telephone networks. I especially liked the part where they transmit data in order to measure the status of the phone line.
- wmf 14y agoThese modems are from 1999 or later, so not exactly ancient. Now I'm wondering if the limit to modem speeds in the 80s and 90s was encoding design or the cost of DSPs to implement more advanced encodings.
- Geee 14y agoI think it's mostly due to the fact that modems used just the audio bandwidth of the telephone line, which is about 3 kHz (by design). This limits the maximum speed, earlier versions probably had problems with transceiver complexity.
- zokier 14y ago> I especially liked the part where they transmit data in order to measure the status of the phone line. Afaik not-so-ancient ADSL does the same thing.
- charonn0 14y agoHere's a rather more ancient modem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE
- nwh 14y agoGot a wave of nostalgia from that, except that the line tests at the end are slightly different than the warbles my modem used to play. It's been years and I can still remember the difference between a 28.8k and 56.6k connection sound.
- js2 14y agoI started with a 300 bps modem (Novation AppleCat II, it could actually do 1200 half-duplex to another AppleCat II). From there a 2400 bps modem, then a 9600, then finally a 56k before I had ISDN, DSL, etc. I remember the evolution in tones but never knew what they were till I took a signaling class in college. One of the projects in that class was to build visual transmitters. We'd stand outside a few hundred yards apart and see how fast we could transmit a message to a partner. The trick to being fast was encoding multiple bits in each symbol, but not so many you'd fumble around grabbing the next symbol. I think my transmitter encoded 2 bits at a time (so four symbols). Aside, the Apple Cat II was a fascinating modem - http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Machines/cat/ http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Machines/cat/
- alexkus 14y agoThe early modems I had access to were 300/300 or 1200/75. Ah! V.23. The 75 baud backward channel of 1200/75 was good enough to keep up with typing so it was my preferred speed when accessing various things remotely where I never needed to send large amounts of text/data but had lots of data coming back the other way.
- jimzvz 14y agoWhat I never understood is why the modem plays this through its speakers instead of some other tone that lets us know that it is connecting. Any explanation?
- unwind 14y agoCheaper and easier to just play back what's happening on the phone line (and it might help in debugging, if you're seriously competent), than somehow generating a "prettier" sound? That feels like the obvious explanation to me ... Not sure if that means it must be wrong. :)
- teeray 14y agoFrom what I've understood it's so you can identify if the line is, in fact, a modem. Easy to diagnose the issue when you hear "Mach Pizza, can I take your order?" coming through the speaker
- codezero 14y agoAs modems got faster, the tones being played were pretty identifiable by a human. I could tell if my 56k connection was negotiating down to 28.8 or some other slower speed and preemptively disconnect and try again in order to get a better connection.
- Groxx 14y agoMy pet theory is that it's to convince you that your computer is doing something, instead of sitting there. One of my happiest moments growing up was finding out how to mute the damn thing - it annoyed everyone in my family :)
- Eduard 14y agoThe current diagram version is missing those funky sounds starting at 21.50 sec
- quahada 14y agoA better way to picture a dial-up modem's sound is as a digital communication constellation. Modems likely used BPSK, QPSK, 8-PSK, 16-QAM, etc modulations. For a theoretical example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation
- quahada 14y agoActually, a little research showed that a 56k modem uses PCM and PAM modulation schemes: http://www.eetimes.com/design/communications-design/4018048/An-Introduction-to-the-V-90-56K-Modem http://www.eetimes.com/design/communications-design/4018048/... So primitive...
- jgrahamc 14y agoThe phone number dialed in this appears to be +1 570 234 0003.
- mertd 14y agoSpot on. It is also written in the image.
- nollidge 14y agoTo reveal the magician's secret: the lower tone indicates the row on the phone keypad, and the higher tone indicates the column. So on a keypad, the first four digits 1-5-7-0 consecutively goes down the keypad's rows and alternate between the first and second column, and you can see that same pattern in the picture. IOW, each digit plays a two-note chord indicating the row and column on the keypad. EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_keypad
- codezero 14y agoI love the commentary added in the image, it makes the modems' negotiation sound like a bragging competition.
- antirez 14y agoThe blog is fantastic, really -> http://windytan.blogspot.it/ http://windytan.blogspot.it/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- axelfreeman 14y agoI like it too. Thanks for sharing. :)
- a_p 14y agoThe audio file on wikimedia commons provides automatically transcribed closed captioning that is unintentionally hilarious. The Portuguese subtitles include "Tchaaaaahhh puaaaoooooaaahhhhh" and "sshhhhhhshshhhhhhh." http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dial_up_modem_noises.ogg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dial_up_modem_noises....
- a3_nm 14y agoAre you sure those were automatically transcribed? https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=TimedText:Dial_up_modem_noises.ogg.en.srt&action=history https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=TimedText:Di... says they were uploaded by an anonymous user. I think this is a joke created by a human.
- DrPhish 14y agoWhen I was growing up, my buddy's dad happened to be an old Berkley unix guru greybeard mad scientist type who told great stories of dumpster diving and the olden days. I was running a BBS at the time, and he told me stories of working in a modem manufacturing facility in QC. According to him, they would whistle into the receiver of each modem in order to test that it was at least minimally operational. I tried this a number of times by dialing into my BBS and got good enough to be able whistle up a 9600baud connection. I don't know why, but I really relished getting that rush of static noise after connecting successfully.
- UntitledNo4 14y agoSlightly related, Looper's Modem Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3VzSv4ErEg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3VzSv4ErEg
- hamxiaoz 14y agoVery nice graph, does anyone know which tool to generate such a graph?
- barakm 14y agoThe graph is a spectrogram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrogram You've probably seen one before in relation to music. However, since we're dealing with computer-generated tones here, the spectrogram looks very very sparse (few overtones). You can see patterns in music as well, just not as clearly (because there's a lot more going on). If you'd like to make your own, consider looking into GNU Octave (http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/) or possibly Scilab, both of which are free. EDIT: I might add that Audacity can easily view the spectogram of a sound file, but if you want to manipulate the signal programatically (filters and so on; signal processing is a great subject), try the above.
- aw3c2 14y agohttp://www.sonicvisualiser.org/ http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/ Or with sox.
- nitrogen 14y agoThose of us who have been using Linux long enough to have written or used visualizer plugins for XMMS had the joy of becoming familiar with the Fast Fourier Transform.
- yitchelle 14y agoAcoustic Couplers. The bane of my early childhood. When "real" modems came on sale, it was like the heavens opens and angels sang. For those old enough, you know what I am talking about. It really is a wonder that this type of communications caught on at all when it started with acoustic couplers.
- yuhong 14y agoAh, the old Bell system and Carterfone, though to be honest people still used these later on for things like payphones.
- kiallmacinnes 14y agoSo - I've always wondered, but never looked into this.. Why does dial-up always sound the same? That clip is exactly how I remember my modems sounding! Edit: Hah, Scroll down Kiall, scroll down.
- ajpiano 14y agoI wanted to see where in the spectrogram the sound was as it was playing, so I threw together this quickie jsbin to make it happen: http://jsbin.com/amunug/10 http://jsbin.com/amunug/10 Useful for anyone else who wants to be able to match the sounds and pictures, I hope!
- isnotchicago 14y agoYour image wasn't loading for me, so I updated with the correct (for me) URL. http://jsbin.com/amunug/7 http://jsbin.com/amunug/7
- ajpiano 14y agoAfter a bit of back and forth, here's a working one with a persistent image link and the proper proportions http://jsbin.com/amunug/17 http://jsbin.com/amunug/17 :)
- mech4bg 14y agoIt worries/amazes me that along with all the nostalgia that this thread has brought up, it's made me realize I can still remember parts of my 28.8k modem's initialization string. AT&F&C1&D2 from memory. Reading someone else's post about the Apple Cat II just reminded me of the sheer joy of experimentation at the time. While what we have now was what we were ultimately striving for and would have switched to in a heartbeat, I'm glad for the experience I gained at the time. And I didn't know better so I still loved it :) I just want to know how I got my first BBS numbers - I was visiting NZ when I got my first modem, and somehow got hold of some local numbers and then found other BBSes from there... but how did I get the first one?
- aidos 14y agoIt was all word of mouth back then. I grew up in nz and while I didn't have a modem back in the bbs days, my best friend did. I distinctly remember cycling over to one of the bbs operators houses to pay him for extra access (he had two lines). Quite magical times really.