The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)

I get waves of nostalgia when I hear that screeching sound. At work, when the fax machine was still sitting in my office, I deliberately turned the sound on (for those who don't know: the initial handshake part sounds pretty much the same for modems and fax). Then we got a shiny new printer/scanner/fax that now sits in the hallway. When I had Internet access for the first time (1996), I used a 14.4 modem for about a year, before…

It's amazing that modem speeds reached 56Kb/s over analog lines that were digitized at 64Kb/s. Especially since T1 carrier systems stole one low-order bit in every other sample for control purposes. That's an incredible accomplishment of signal processing. As late as the mid-1970s, it was believed to be theoretically impossible. Bell Labs once did a study that concluded that 19Kb/s was the upper limit for analog phone lines. It's also impressive that the modem negotiation process worked as well as…

I've made a ring-tone out of the 56k USR modem. Advantages: - The sound cuts through ALL background noise. - Nobody else uses it, so I don't worry about false positives - I geek a Nostalgia-dopamine hit when I hear it. Disadvantages: - Nobody ever calls me

Here is a really cool collection of modem sounds: https://goughlui.com/2016/05/03/project-the-definitive-colle... https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/soundofmodems/index.htm https://archive.goughlui.com/legacy/modemlab/index.htm