Why does dial up make that sound

The end of the song comes when modem speakers go silent, allowing the computers themselves to start transferring data according to the terms set during the handshake. Robotic communication is now frequently too complex to be understood by humans, including the engineers who design it. Nostalgia for the days of dial-up may be a sign that transparency is almost worth the slowest connection imaginable. Type keyword s to search.

By Lynne Peskoe-Yang. Jill Ferry Photography Getty Images. More from the Internet's Past. As you all remember so fondly, dial-up ran through your phone line, so it would need to essentially work its way into the network. The clear and distinct different sounds you hear while it's connecting are different parts of what they call "the handshake". It starts by dialing, and then the firsts set of noises you hear are actually letting you know the speed your modem can go.

According to a very old website about the internet, "Depending on the speed the modem is trying to talk at, this tone will have a different pitch. Then it continues on to get some more parameters before getting the actual connection speed and then finally, after what feels like a million years later, you are connected.

Once the speakers agree on a language they speak well, the conversation takes off, and the modem politely takes it private. Someday it will shut off for good. But the early internet created a nostalgia machine, and people are preserving its birth screeches, as in this medley.

By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. Follow Quartz. This was configured by sending AT M1 to the modem during setup.

See the AT command set for more information. The actual transmission noise that you would hear if you picked up the phone during an active session as opposed to during this handshake procedure just sounds like static. Those noises are the process of the 'hand-shake' going on between your modem and the modem of your ISP. In a literal sense, your modem is calling another modem, much like a classic telephone.

Once the connection is established after the hand-shake is successful, i. The technical reason is that because modems work over phone lines, which are by and large used by human beings to make voice calls, it behooves us, in data communication equipment going over the voice network, to have an amplifier and speaker which monitor the audio signal on the line during connection establishment. This lets us hear things like busy signals, or the voice of a human being if we happen to dial a telephone rather than another modem.

Of course, since the signals are all mixed into one line, we cannot just hear the voice or just the busy signal without also hearing the modem's signals. Note how, at some point in the establishment of the data connection, the monitoring is disabled.

This is a feature of the modem: it squelches that amplifier and speaker because the monitoring has served its purpose, and its continuation would be an annoyance.

Modems transmit data by Modulating a signal tone , and receive data by Demodulating the signal tone. The sound they generate is the modulated signal. By using a tone, they can transmit a digital signal over an acoustic sound channel.

The original modems with the cups for the headset were also known as acoustic couplers. The original modems used a simple signalling system. As speed increased, the signalling system became more complex. Noise on the line degrades the available speed.

Higher speed signalling mechanisms have error correction, and speed adjustment mechanisms built into the protocol. North American phone systems used to charge a premium for data conditioned lines. Higher speed signals did require a much better signal, and some lines which were fine for voice use would fail to carry the signal at the full rate.

Modern digital phone systems carry sound using a digital signal. This is the upper limit on modem signals traversing a digital switch in North America. Sign up to join this community.

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