Why did the internet make that unique sound when starting up back in the 90s?
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Originally computers connected to each other over normal telephone lines.
You have old-fashioned landline telephones, like you may have seen in old movies or movies set in the past, that had handsets that looked like the symbol for telephone: 📞
You could put that handset on a device connected to a computer that was basically just a microphone and a speaker.
The computer would make sound into the part that humans would speak normally and listen for sound from the part that humans would put their ear on.
On the other end of the telephone call another computer would do the same.
[It would look something like this picture from wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/Coupleur-accoustique-IMG_0298.JPG/320px-Coupleur-accoustique-IMG_0298.JPG).
Computer would literally use this to talk with each other via a series of beeps.
Before they got to that point they first had to make sure they were on the same page. The computers slowly had figure out that they were both talking the same way and could both talk and listen at the same speed. They would start slowly and than explain to each other what type of functions they both supported and needed and what max speed they could both handle.
These beeps and bits were much slower than normal “talking” because they had to be make the negotiation of what they were both capable of at the lowest possible level.
Eventually someone figured out that since the signals in the telephone line were electrical and the computes were electrical it made little sense to transform the signals into sounds and then have a telephone-receiver transform those sounds back into electrical signals.
You could just create a device that you could plug directly into a telephone jack, like a landline telephone or fax machine or answering machine and have that connect to the computer.
There was no need for actual noises to be made, you could just send the signals those noises were supposed to create in a microphone directly through the wire.
However people who had been using the older style modems that did make noises, had found the noises sometimes useful.
If you knew what was happening you could listen to the computer negotiating with the other side and establishing a connection.
More importantly you could listen to where something went wrong.
People could tell when the sound of the connection being established didn’t sound the way it was supposed to and even understand which part had gone wrong.
It was a very nerdy skill to have, but in those days mostly just nerds used those things.
So modems got a speaker through which they could play the whole back and forth of the connection being established for diagnostic purposes.
People could hear the number being dialed, the other side picking up the back and forth as they negotiate each others capabilities and tested the quality of the phone line they were talking over and then did a quick test of things like equalizer and echo canceling at the end and then the speaker would cut out and the computers would talk to each other without that being transformed into noise.
Obviously this was not useful info for everyone and there was a command that you could send to your modem to tell it to stop actually putting that part though to the speaker.
However you needed to either have read your manual carefully or had someone on a bulletin board or a the USENET explain it to you or come across it in a computer magazine in order to know that command.
Many people never figured that part out or were to lazy to do it or like the sound it made and thus this optional diagnostic feature was stuck on for many computer users.
People even if they could not make use of it came to expect it.
Later when stuff like winmodems and softmodems came out they didn’t actually have the ability to make that sound anymore, but people still expected the sound so much that the would simply play an audio file of a generic dial-up connection sound. It was useless for any sort of diagnostic purposes since it was just a recording not the live sound of the connection being established, but it gave people the reassuring sound they expected at that point.
So it came from a feature that original had real use to something useless that was kept on because people expected to hear it.
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