Reminiscing About Dialup

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The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.
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This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. “A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz,” Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. “The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines.” What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you’re hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.

5 thoughts on “Reminiscing About Dialup”

  1. Entering Hayes AT Commands – ah those were the days. I remember downloading a printer driver from an HP bulletin board and suddenly realising that there was more to this malarky than bad porn

  2. My first dial up was with a 300 baud rate TI Silent 700. It was awesome as I could work from home during an emergency instead of going into the office.

  3. i can remember using an acoustically coupled modem back in 1977. it didn’t hook up to the internet, it hooked up to a Unisys mainframe that the company allowed local students to access and learn about computers. our BASIC programs were saved on 1″ rolls of paper tape. i also played Oregon Trail. fun!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

  4. What amazes me is that the exact same telephone line that I once used for dial-up can now deliever 30 megabits per second. Of course that new box humming away at the end of the road might have something to do with it!

  5. no wonder when i picked up a phone that was connected to the same line as an active dial up modem and yelled “get off the phone” it fried our modem

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