eli5: The “handshake” between dial-up modems and why it made those sounds

Question

eli5: The “handshake” between dial-up modems and why it made those sounds

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Answer 1

So a modem is called a modulator/demodulator, because it encodes data from digital to analogue and back again. On your computer it is digital information, but if you want to talk to another computer you need to transform that data in a way it can be transmitted over a telephone line. The sounds you are hearing is analogue data being converted to digital data (1’s & 0’s). It’s similar to the old telegraph machines when they used mores code, but instead of a human converting the data you have a machine doing it faster and more accurately.