Everyone of an age remembers the distinctive dial-up modem sounds but why were they audible to begin with?
In: Technology
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.
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