hckrnws
Somewhat related: Old post "The sound of the dialup, pictured" https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-picture... (Biggest HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635144 | 675 points | Nov 2017 | 108 comments, and a few more discussions in https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20sound%20of%20the%20dialu... )
Oh, nostalgia. I had a US Robotics 56K modem, which produced two bell-alike sounds during handshake. It was cool. I search for that specific sounds for years and cannot find.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k&t=99
This matches my memory of 56k dialup with the two BONGs.
And now I get to share my favorite AT command. M0 could mute the modem! M1 was quieter than the default. I will never understand why those weren't more common! Used like: ATM0DT
I never wanted to mute, because with sound you could hear a bad connection early and retry faster.
And you could hear the call waiting beep if you didn’t have a dedicated line for the PC.
Yup, this exactly.
I've also been searching for that double-bong for years.
Last time I asked, user hackmiester pointed me to https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-colle...
The "Texas Instruments DSP based Modems" linking to USR-Sportster-bong-bong.wav is pretty close to what I remember.
edit: hackernudes reply is perfect. The youtube auto generated subtitles are pleasing too.
Me, before clicking: Man, I remember I had this USR modem that did this weird BONG sound during handshake. I wonder if anyone else in the comments remembers that.
Comments: YUP.
Amazing, however when I changed the number I expected an audio recording of some guy answering in the middle of the night over a modem negotiation sound
After getting excited that you could change the phone number the fact that it did not beep it was a little let down. I wonder if the shown default number matches the number in the audio at all?
Anyways, cool project and I like the easy to remember domain.
Nice job. I saw something like this a little while ago [1] which showed the Hayes AT-DT command but otherwise was pretty limited. Don't forget to use the Network tools to throttle your connection for a more faithful experience!
Feedback:
- The click sound is absurdly loud.
- Is 31,200 bps a UK thing? I grew up in the era of 14.4, 28.8, and 33.6 kbps.
- You should chop up the audio file so the number of tones matches the number of digits in the phone number field.
The change to authentication happened before the modem negotiation ended, this should be fixed, all it need it's a short delay until the audio ends, and THEN start auth.
it felt suddenly expensive to be online again...
For me it brings back a time when the internet felt more personable. Everything these days is boring, Facebook profiles, Tiktoks and Instagrams all look the same. We need the personal days back where people put their heart and soul into building their geocities page. Where you never knew what you'd find next when you press the next link on that web ring.
Seconded. Blogs are great but the old school blogs were David vs Goliath. I remember how much fun it was to cycle through my web ring and see all the extremely creative sites. Some flash, some just clever JavaScript, none of it used jquery or react or components. In fact, one was a giant anchor area image divided up into sections (not sliced designs, one whole image! With target boxes for clickable regions).
I still have my deviantart profile from the inevitable collapse into corporate. Web design took a turn for the smashing and now it all looks the same.
Everyone was still too cautious to type their credit card in or something. There was nothing to monetize. So, yeah, every website was someone's small passion project, with handwritten HTML.
State of the art for discovery used to be browsing a (manually?) curated directory on Yahoo. Google appeared and was a mind-blowing sea change. That's probably the peak, Google's inception up until jackass SEO marketers appeared. During that window, search worked fantastically over content that was fun to read.
Very nice!
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't the lights of the icon computers light up for transmitting and receiving?
Yes, in the Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP notifications area of the taskbar - https://www.computerhope.com/issues/pictures/windows-98-task...
The AOL version missed an opportunity: After connecting it should have said, "You've got mail!"
It does, maybe try again, the MP3 may have failed to load in.
it 100% does already
Somebody else must've already read mine.
I’ve tried to explain my kid how we went online back in the days. Need to show this to her.
About 15 years ago I gave some networking courses at a local education center, it was all young kids (18-20 years old). When I told them that the speed we got back in the day was 4 kilobytes per second (56k on a good day), they didn't believe me at all.
I remember using a “high-speed” 14.4 kbps modem. I mean, these were thousands of bits per second, really insane. Faster than many LLMs.
At 2400, you could watch the characters from the BBS come up on your screen, but at 14.4 practically the whole page came up at once!
Ah good old dial up days in early 2000s. Browsing means the phone cannot be used for calling.
:)
So good. But 31kbps? Wow. You guys were spoilt. 28.8 is the best we got and on a very good day when the lines were nice and dry. I think he even nailed the link upgrade sound on the modem.
My first interaction with the internet was an old Windows 3.1 machine with 14.4kbps modem, then we upgraded to a Windows 95 machine with 28.8kbps and later we swapped out the ISA modem for a PCI 56kbps modem. Then ADSL came along and the rest is history. Presumably the modem in this example is a 33.6kbps V.34 modem which had a slightly lower sync negotiated due to a poor line.
Yeah I don't think we ever got that fast in South Africa. I started out on a 1200 baud modem on something called Beltel which is like Prestel which was the UK equivalent. At the time our entire country's international internet connection was via a 9600 modem based at Grahamstown university and the other universities shared that link AFAIK. Then I got a borrowed VMS account at university of cape town which I could use to telnet to a sun unix box and run IRC and my life changed. Was also phone phreaking from Cape Town at a little later on using BlueBeep to connect to a BBS in Orange County called Digital Decay. Was suuuper lucky when I'd get a 14.4 connection on the international trunk. Mostly it was slower. But the AT&T home country directs had the best lines when they were seizable.
I don't know if this was an indian thing but we'd get a dopamine hit type tone at the end and that's not present in this audio.
i was expecting web browser after dialup :(
Sorry, maybe in V2
i don't know if its the mandela effect but the sound is not accurate.
I think it varied by modem model and maybe also the type of telephony system in your country. This sounds faithful to what I used to hear in the UK.
Sounds totally accurate to me.
Sucks that we don’t have these kind of little rituals today. Everything is just always on. This kind of thing sounds like you were blasting off into the future, your day was divided between offline and online, and this was you crossing the barrier to the next world.
I need to press "Stop" before all images fully load
I wanted the AOL one to say "Welcome" before "you've got mail!" lol
Guess I don’t have any mail :(
https://theoldnet.com and https://protoweb.org, try their proxy on legacy machines and have fun travelling in time.
Also: https://wiby.me
Great
Just needs a pulse dialing option ;)
This is a masterpiece
Thank you :-)
I am tempted to add additional OS / dialers.
Now do minicom and pppd!
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code