Everyone of an age remembers the distinctive dial-up modem sounds but why were they audible to begin with?
In: Technology
baiscally, they are using a version of dial tones to carry data as audio tones, to pass the back and forth messaging required to establish a connection between the two modems that are trying to use the dial up link, and ensure both sides are expecting the correct format, data rate, etc.
Here’s a video that explains what each noise means:
[Why Does Dial Up Sound The Way It Does? (An Explanation) (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp47x1EabqI)
You could turn it off and make it silent, but hearing it means you could tell the progress the connection negotiation was making and everyone from that time will be familiar when they got a bad line and it was struggling to negotiate a good speed – or was going to disconnect.
Also, if you called the wrong number and got a regular phone, you could hear them speaking on the other end so knew you’d somehow screwed up.
Some of the first modems had a physical dock to put a handset on, so there had to be an audible exchange of data. As that was the norm, being able to audibly hear it was dialing was a bit of a carryover. The last gens of modems were silent, but piped the sounds into your sound card, a setting you could turn off in Windows settings.
Imagine it’s 1980. You and your high-tech friends all have computers in your homes and offices. You want to chat, or send files to one another. How?
The Internet exists, but you can’t get it at home or at most offices. Only a few large companies and universities actually have an Internet connection.
But, everyone has a telephone. It’s relatively cheap and easy to get an additional phone line for your home or office.
So, the solution is to have computer talk to each other using the telephone.
Telephones only send sounds! So for computers to communicate, they need to turn bits and bytes into sounds.
That’s what a modem does. The first computer turns bits and bytes into sounds. The receiving computer turns the sounds back into bits and bytes.
When the two modems first connect, they send sounds that do a “handshake” – they enable each other to figure out what speed to talk, and test the line to see if there’s any interference.
The reason it’s audible is so that you can hear if it’s working or not. If you tell your modem and someone on the other end picks up the phone and says “sorry, the computer is broken” you’ll hear it, and you won’t wonder why it’s not connecting.
They were audible to help identify connection issues – if your modem dialed a fax line by mistake you could hear the fax connection sounds and know that was the wrong number. Or if it dialed a person’s number you could hear them ask “Hello?” moments before the modem tried to deafen them.
They are audible so you can hear if there’s a person answering at the other end, or to hear the busy signal or an operator’s automatic response e.g. “This Number is no Longer in Service”
Here’s a video of the sound actually being made
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1AQcGGSec](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1AQcGGSec)
It was literally making a phone call and all the information had to happen at phone call frequency as phone call sound information
Latest Answers