It's a part of the V.90 spec called the Digital Impairment Learning sequence (DIL). The analog (client) modem asks the digital (ISP) modem to send a set of symbols (sounds). When the analog modem receives those symbols, it can compare the sound it asked for and the sound it received to determine how it was degraded by any digital conversions along the path from the ISP, and then adjust the connection speed to compensate. How the digital signal is degraded might be affected by the CODEC used, things like Robbed Bit Signalling, etc. The interesting thing here is that the V.90 spec doesn't actually specify what the DIL sounds should be, just that the digital modem should send whatever the analog modem asks for. The result is that it can sound quite different for different client modems. US Robotics modems tend to have those two 'BONG' sounds, while Rockwell chipsets have a weird sort of low-frequency feedback-loop sound that gets louder and louder. There's a bunch of different V.90 modem chipsets, and they all sound different.
i thought that too, i had an awful copper phone line dangling from wood poles came in front of the house, then had to ran a cable all the to the back where the desk was.
I remember the lousy connections too, and it really does take a lot longer. I've been replicating them with my RJ-11 to handset adapters in a few tests. I'd like to find a reproducible way to artificially degrade a line and reproduce the longer handshakes.
@@retrocet two RJ-11 sockets and a couple spools worth of wire between them. You might want to stretch the loop out to your whole property boundary to get the most interference.
The fact that someone invested its time to acuratelly transcribe the modem noises into subtitles, made me smile. Laughed my ass off LOL, I might have a problem.
In 1982 I built a 300 baud modem from a schematic in Popular Electronics. The hard part was that I had to tune it and I had nothing to tune it with. So I called up a local BBS over and over and held down a key on the computer while I turned the potentiometer back and forth. It took several calls until by chance I hit the right frequency and the key echoed back.
@@brodriguez11000 A magazine did a test (2-3 years back) where they found most modern webpages will not load (properly) on a 56K and many scripts will fail to execute and time out.
@@jamegumb7298 Sounds like the scripts are set to time out a lot sooner now, so that they don't take as long to proceed. Now, even ADSL at 14 Mbps down and 700 Kbps up, will be painful!
Too bad it was mislabeled. Modems were listed in BAUD rate until they reached 4800 Baud. Then they switched over to Bps. Reason is from what I understand, the US FCC has a limit of 2400 Baud on the telephone system. So they had to switch over to a digital to analog system to try to cram more bits flowing over the analog telephone system with only 4800 Baud available to fit all that info within it.
What most people don't realize is the hardest one of those to get working was the 56K connection since it requires digital on one side (hence the ISDN modem). BRAVO!
Umm.. as an ex-modem tech… I disagree. We use to setup back-to-back 56k links all day.. we even had a dialler (like this one) to do so. It was all in the s-register setup. We also had 56k modem racks for bbs systems so they could run their systems too (over pstn… )
@@aususer415 The point is you can't just connect two consumer 56K modems to each other and get a 56k connection, unlike ALL prior standards where you could do that. You need a digital to analog conversion in the mix to get the 56k class connection.
@@kleetus92 Sorry, no you can't. You'll get a connection, but it won't be above 33k, sorry. The modes above 33k only worked because the modems knew that the source was digital and were able to detect levels based on that assumption. It just doesn't work in the pure analog domain. Why would the OP have an ISDN modem in the mix for the 56k example?
@@repatch43 No idea, but in the last example, he has 3 modems out there so... He also used the 56K modem on the laptop side for all the examples with the exception of the 300 baud. didn't have 2 56k Externals. Where the logic falls apart is if it has to have an ISDN line to work, how the hell does it make it out of the house on POTS?
I love how it progressively adds more stuff to the end, going from simple dial tones to the handshakes you hear with 56k. I was born at the peak of 56k and by the time I was old enough to use the family computer, we already had Charter cable internet.
Charter is a specific phone company in your backwards country . Educated countries know the signal types by their actual names such as DSL, Cable TV, cellular 3G/4G/5G and fiber .
I spent many an hour goofing around on dialup BBS's. Thats something kids today will never get to experience. Oh the fun that used to of been had on those things
@@gdfgdfgdggdhhgfgfh1271 Yeah, there will never again be anything like it -- even the early internet days didn't have that close-knit community feel of BBS's. There weren't more than 4 or 5 of us computer & trekkie nerds in my own middle and high school, but we met so many other like-minded friends, thanks to our cities BBS scene. Quite the exclusive little community, before the internet popularized computers with the masses.
Same here! I long for those days when computers weren't cool. Everything seemed so much more special then. When you had to wait for something. Hey, I spent an entire weekend downloading this!
This is the kind of cool stuff I like to see on RUclips. Definitely V.90 56K was most familiar to me! I'm surprised to see how fast the connection process was at the lower baud rates though, I guess there was less to negotiate once the connection was made.
Yeah, the V.90 in particular is an eternity. I have a non-upgraded USR X2 modem that will connect to the I-modem using X2 instead of V.90, and it's a lot quicker, though obviously still a lot longer than, say, V.22.
US Robotics still hosts the files to do it. They're little DOS programs. For example: www.usr-emea.com/support/s-prod-template.asp?loc=emea&prod=sportster
Ahh … 300 baud. It’s like I’m a freshman in high school again. Saved up and bought a 1200 within a year and half. Not just twice as fast but THREE TIMES faster. I could watch (and read and comprehend) the text fill the screen at 300 but 1200 was hard. And in college I went 2400 as that became affordable. Talk about light speed! I was surprised by how long it took to connect with my 28.8 (not shown in the video, which skips from 14.4 to 33.6) as I’d been so used to the brevity of 2400 and slower. As compared to someone who only knew the faster modems with slower handshake process being surprised at how quickly the slower modems connected. I guess when you’re slow you’ve got no time to waste on longer handshakes. Of course as soon as I bought my 28.8, 33.6 came out. FWIW, I recall my 28.8 sounding like the 33.6 (vs 14.4). Probably didn’t matter that I didn’t have faster as my phone line often had a little noise. Not much but enough that I didn’t always get full speed. A 33.6 or 56 would likely always have dropped down to a slower speed. Couldn’t wait to get my cable modem as soon as it was offered in town (2001).
Those were the days :) remember hosting my BBS and seeing my friends phone number with something weird like 1200/75 connection, calling him asking wtf he’s trying to connect with giving those weird setups… and him answering that he was screaming and whistling, thinking my BBS had pre-connection audio on. So apparently humans can successfully perform some of the modem handshakes.
Man that is really something to hear again... I started with a 300 baud and did the progression all the way to 56k in the late 80's early 90's dialing up friends BBS's (bulletin board systems for the kids out there... aka pre-internet). I remember adding *57 to turn off call waiting because it would crash the connection if someone called. One time I was about to dial into my Friday evening jaunt around the boards (I was only 18) and the phone rang right as I put my hand down to hit enter to dial... It was my parents calling saying they had a blowout on a tire and needed me to load up the spares for the truck and bring them out to them an hour from home. Had I been 5 seconds faster they'd never have gotten through and would have really been stuck for a few hours while I was online... I will never forget that! Thank you for the memories!
That hollow echo for 56K was the sweetest sound. Until line quality degraded and then it switched to the static with slightly quieter static for 33.6. If it repeated the static again, but without the quieter one, it was time to break and redial.
Reminds me of a buggy 56K modem that I also had, where it was notorious for randomly negotiating at 26.4 Kbps! That was on one of my PCs in 2004, IIRC.
I was terrified of these sounds as a kid. I could hear my parents using it in the next room after I’d gone to bed and had no idea what it was. To this day I still find it pretty creepy!
@@StereoMike06 I don't think I've ever seen a PCI US Robotics modem but I have two of their internal ISA modems and they sound the same as the external ones here.
I see the US Robotics. I worked for *Racal-Vadic* in the '70's. I help design the 9600 Bps Model. And was on the "Standards Comity" that help adopt the "at" command set.
A Racal Vadic 1200 baud modem was my first, complete with the non Hayes command set. Control E, enter, then… I can’t remember. Thanks for the memory, though. :)
My first ever interaction with a modem was in 1978 at the tender age of 15. We connected our high school DECwriter to a PDP-11 at 300 baud via an acoustic coupler. As I recall, there was a switch to select between 110 and 300 baud, so we had the fast setting. I still remember the modem sound along with that awesome dot-matrix sound of the DECwriter. That was a much simpler time. Thanks for the memories!
I remember "war-dialing" a server's modem bank to identify the various modem speeds by the connection sounds back in '97. I had been given a couple of numbers in the sequence and started working my way up and down sequentially, finding that there were around 30 different lines available, and only ~10 had 56k, the rest were 33.6k modems. Hearing the two "dong, dong" tones toward the end of the connection handshake was a moment of joy whenever I found them. I think I still have the Diamond Supra Express 56k external modem, stuck in a box somewhere. A relic today, but it lasted through at least 3 or 4 computers back in the day, until cable modems finally replaced dial-up.
@@Krzys_D Yeah, it was kind of a lottery back the times. Sometimes the two modem couldn't get any agreement and the connection broke. Online time was expensive in the mid 90s, so we checked our e-mails and disconnected as soon as they have been retrieved. Reading and answering have been done offline. Man, am I old! 😉
It's fun watching this having previously watched a video breaking down what each tone is doing on the 56k and seeing how it progressed over the years into the more complex series of handshakes and screeches it ends up being at the end
I used to work at US Robotics, this was my life for years, if I remember correctly the tail end of the connection that last swoosh sound on all the connections was the compression v42bis / MNP5. We used to be able to tell what the users connections were by ear. Back in the day before the 3 Com merger it was an amazing place to work at.
That's great to hear! I know there are a lot of videos already out there with a few modem sounds, but I really want to try to capture and document the original sounds using original equipment that you can actually see doing its thing (not that there's a ton to see), at least as much as my collection would allow. I'm glad you liked it!
back in mid 80s I used to dial up my local X25 access point and poke about the various institutions found on there. The access point modem had a very short initial carrier period before the line was disconnected. My 1200 baud modem couldn't respond that quickly so I became very adept at whistling the response tone into my handset keeping the other end responding while my modem caught up! I still can whistle that pure tone today.
@@pyeltd.5457 I'm pretty sure I had a PYE RTTY radio modem as well. Can't be 100% certain though. A local oddments shop had a myriad of used radio and telecoms equipment that I used to rummage through and buy.
I ran a 2 line BBS in the mid-90s with a bunch of games both local and networked to other BBSes. I remember those sounds so well. I also remember the 'call outs' every night when our board would connect to various sites for mail and forums and other such. It got to the point that the normal modem noises didn't wake me up only the bad connection noises either from our call outs or one of our users calling in for some late night gaming. Hearing this takes me back.
Oh, that Modem sound! Dialing up "Bulletin Boards" in 1979! I didn't know the old modems ever got up to 14,400 or 33,600. Just right for my 386! Thanks!
Oh boy, this has brought back some memories. Back in the day (somewhere around 2002) my school still had 56Kbps modems to connect us to the internet. They've upgraded to a DOCSIS cable modem in late 2004 as far as I can remember. We haven't had a proper internet connection at home until 2007, because it was prohibitively expensive. A 5/1Mbps ADSL would've costed something like 1/5th of my father's monthly wage, and the 768/312kbps ISDN was also not cheap either, plus the toll-free part of it was limited to something like 50 hours or 5 GBs if my mind serves me right. In 2007, a new ISP appeared at my location, which has offered a variety of FTTB services for low prices, and we got a 20/10 Mbps service in early September, 2007. Fun fact: some 14 years later the ISP I've mentioned has hired me to work for them, lol.
I remember getting a 56k modem and it felt amazing at the time. Even if you had a 56k, you weren't guaranteed to get that speed. You had to be fairly close to a switching station, otherwise it would lower to 33.6 or 28.8.
Sometimes it would lower to an intermediary level like 49K . Fortunately by that time I had upgraded to actual ISDN for everything until they shut that down around new years with only 2 months notice and no meaningful upgrade path .
This video pretty much sums up my early online years starting with and so it begins, 300 BPS to last the last stop before broadband, 56K. I'll always fondly remember those days -- in particular the "NO CARRIER" message when you were cut off suddenly while in the middle of doing something online by someone trying to make a call on a phone somewhere else in the house.
We had a second line to prevent that. Though we did have a couple 2-line phones (so we could call from the second line too if someone was on the phone), so I won't say it _never_ happened in our house.
"The connection was reset while the page was loading" error message from the web browser when disconnected. (Firefox, IIRC) And the modem is suddenly redialing.
Wow, this brings back memories! The ones I’m most familiar with are the 33.6, 56k, and 2400 baud modem connection sounds. My first experience with internet was in the early 90s just before mass public recognition of internet. How far we’ve come!
The same speeds I used. All in 1999, in fact. The parents took the main computer away, but I had another with a Hayes 2400B. Useless for web browsing with images, but enough to chat on IRC.
About a year ago, I had a Courier modem and a VOiP over Google Voice. It was fun being able to log into the dial-up BBS's that are still around. Heck even NetZero worked for a bit.
@@midixiewrecked7011 It wasn't too bad. I did have to set up the latency and echo cancellation settings in the VOiP settings. That's really the only tricky part.
I remember these sounds well and still have a few external US Robotics modems pictured at the beginning of the video and even a couple older ones back when they were five times bigger than the ones shown. I have a whole box full of old 56k internal modems (PCI) salvaged from old PC's. Fastest dial-up speed I ever had was 48k but it typically hovered in the 38k - 42k range. When I finally sprung for a dedicated dial-up line I thought I was in the big league. That was back when a 100 MB file was considered a "huge download"... lol
38Kbps-to-42Kbps, sounds like mine on a very bad day! I usually at least leaned towards 45 Kbps. Albeit it often was 40 Kbps in the Cavendish/Chester woody area. (also Weathersfield) The Weathersfield one was the worst for me! Modem seemed to not like it, lower bandwidth and higher ping, IIRC.
I had a us robotics 56k but it had some silent mode (ok last time I used that modem was in 2002). It was a weird modem, download speed and ping in games was much faster than it should have been.
Thank you! That's what I'm going for here, at least aside from giving myself a nostalgia hit. I really want this modem collection to be a living exhibit of this era of tech
It's cool to see videos comparing dial-up modem sounds. Unfortunately, I never experienced the nostalgia with dialup, due to me only starting to get internet in the early 2000s, when broadband internet started to be a thing.
The sound is super nostalgic for me and I imagine a lot of people around my age. I mean, I switched to cable net as soon as I possibly could, but there was something to be said about dialing up a BBS or the net - hearing the sound that was a prelude to fun. The feeling reminds me of the way the startup sound of a Gameboy or Playstation makes me feel.
We had dialup well until I was like 4 or 5; I never experienced it myself, but my mom would use the computer everyday for work and I'd always get a kick out of the sound whenever she went on
We recently switched away from the old US robotics 56k modems for long distance tank gauging to an Ethernet connection. The dial-up sound was dreaded, because it meant it was having a hard time connecting or the automatic tank gauge was down. Which meant you had to send a runner to get the levels, or manually stick the tanks. If you were working the control center, it meant you were in for a long night doing extra math, determining the problem, and calling in a work order.
Brings back memories of working for an ISP in the 1990s. Most of the time I'd just ask the customer to be quiet for a moment and turn their modem's volume up. I could usually diagnose the issue just by listening to the noises.
My first modem was V23 - 1200/75, used to access Prestel from the BBC Micro back around 1983. Many other modems followed. Listening to the connection handshaking and then the silence was always a magical moment.
1200/75 was the inspiration for the asymmetry in ADSL, squeezing out max download speed at the cost of upload speeds that would only carry keyboard input and URLs most of the day .
Now there is something I haven’t seen myself since school back in ~2001, guess it’s been a few years by now, and as I recall the specs of the cobalt cube were pretty meager even by the standards of when it was made. :)
Thanks for checking it out! I love that laptop to bits, it was the one I had in high school and it also motivated my career a lot too. Though, the one I had in high school was the CS with the dual-scan screen and no CD drive. I upgraded when I started recollecting my old machines again ;)
oh the nostalgia this had on me, thank you so much for posting this, as a kid from the 80's and 90's this brought me so much joy! It reminded me how we had to wait until midnight to dial because you didn't need to pay for pulses after midnight, those were the days!!!
Those sounds are forever burnt into my memory. I used to be able to identify the 14.4, 28.8, and 33.6 handshakes based on some of the minor differences.
Meanwhile I never got to hear the 56k handshake IRL, since we never got around to buying a 56K modem. Fastest we had was 33.6k before we went to broadband in 2000.
@@cybhunter007 I did, because my family's Pentium 133 system that was made in 1996, had a 28.8K modem, LOL. Literally connected with that modem in 2001 to connect to the motherboard manufacturer's web site for the motherboard of my crash-city first-Athlon build, (T-bird 900 MHz with Soyo SY-K7VTA-B motherboard with buggy BIOS) where it kept freezing at defaults!
My first modem was a Commodore 1670 1200 baud modem in 1987. My next modem was a 28.8 Packard Bell internal sound card/modem (1996). The next was a U.S. Robotics 33.6 Sportster external modem (1997 or 1998), and the last modem was a U.S. Robotics 56K V.90 internal modem. I remember the sounds they made well.
Where I live, around 1988 AT&T started selling used "official" 1200 baud modems (from the years before when you had to have a phone company modem) for cheap. They had originally cost several hundred dollars.
That, was a trip down memory lane. My first modem was a 300 baud Vicmodem hooked to a commodore VIC-20. I remember moving up through the tech and eventually feeling jealous of a friend with his really expensive hayes 56K smartmodem.
I ran every one of those speeds on my C-64 and A-500 as well as 16.8, 19.2, and 28.8 until replacing them in 1996 with an actual IBM. It was very shortly after that we got Roadrunner in the area. I was in high cotton then downloading a 5 meg test file in 45 seconds.
My first modem was 2400 baud. Gradually bought faster modems over the years. It was such an event to login to my favorite BBS's. Those were the simple days. Thank you for sharing this video!
Yeah, those were the days! Do you remember the FreeNet movement where nonprofit community organizations sought to provide free service to local users? Users dialed in for free (local call) and you can get a free email/user account. And that’s where I got my first internet account to get mail etc. I wonder if FreeNet community still exists Edit: ok so I found this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-net?wprov=sfti1
Neat. I wish modems connected that quickly in real life. I always seemed to have a crappy phone connection, and even 9600 baud modems would take forever to finish the handshake.
Thank you for this video, and the memories it brought back. Before the fax machine, my office had a quip machine, in the mid 80’s. It was a drum like a cylinder with the 8 1/2 x 11 paper wrapped around it. The drum would spin making a “quip~quip” sound. It would smell funny too, took a long time to send each page. Amazing how technology has changed just over the last few decades.
Had modem at my house until 2003 when we got fiber. Grandma had modem until 2010 when she passed. If internet wasnt filled with unnecessary images it would probably be usable today for browsing. Mostly used it to google basic facts and recipes at grandmas house. Which it did okay. My dad always told the story of how his 33k modem was faster than the 56k. I never really understood how.
That Cobalt machine is gorgeous, and brings back so many memories. In college I cut my teeth programming on SGI Indigo workstations, and then later some O2 ones. Further studies included machines such as an SGI Onyx (was used for teaching low level multiprocessing). It's wild to think how much different it is now that I can just import Python's multiprocessing library-instead of dealing with hardware spinlocks.
Wow very cool demonstration! Never thought about how each connection speed sounded different. And seeing the data render on the screen at different speeds was a great idea. These sounds really bring back memories of simpler times! Excellent video!
I originally got connected around 1996 (I think) when my Dad got a workplace laptop that had a 28K Gold Card PCMCIA modem from what I recall. After a few years, he had it upgraded to a 56K Flex modem, which I recall he had to get firmware to convert it to be V90 capable. The most common connection speeds I had were 9600, 28K (old modem), 33.6K (until the ISP got 56K) and 40-45.3K thereafter. For about 6 months around the year 2000, we were stuck at 9600 due to noise on our phone line until we finally managed to get an engineer out. Back then, data was not considered a necessity, so most support calls ended up going nowhere as they would just do a remote end-to-end connectivity test and deem the issue not a line fault. Between 2003 and 2005, I had satellite ADSL, which used a satellite dish based connection for the downlink and a dial-up modem for the upload. That gave me 300Kbps down and about 28Kbps up from what I recall and a 1.5GB / 300 hour monthly allowance (which ever used up first). In 2005, we got ISDN installed to let us use the phone and Internet simultaneously, which also gave 64Kbps up in combination with the 300Kbps satellite based download. To my surprise, our exchange got DSL enabled 3 months after the ISDN installation, which required removing the ISDN line due to order DSL! That took several months. I had DSL right up until 2018 and now use a 4G based Internet connection due to DSL being limited to 5Mbps with my rural location.
I miss the one modem that had a bug in it and was dubbed the screaming cat modem. I had a modem that had a bug in it I used for my Amiga 500 that would max out at 600 baud but sometimes it would bug out and connect at 1200 baud and sometimes it would work! Around that time Microsoft introduced the multilink protocol so if we had multiple phone lines in the house we could use multiple modems and double the speed of our data transmission by dedicating 2 modems for data in and 2 modems data out. It was really great back then. Then Juno came out for free dialup email service then another in the 90's came out with free dialup internet. I abused those services like crazy. Dialing in then using a hack program to hide the ads in which they demanded to stay at the top of your monitor to show banner ads.
Was the free ISP NetZero? I also remember trying to get around the ads, though the best part of NetZero was being able to play Diablo II online for free when I was on the road. Good times. I never got to shotgun two modems like that! That's super cool! I always wanted to try it - I've been thinking about trying to set it up here at home and I have a quad 56K modem card on the way that I'm hoping to install into the Qube to try it out.
There was also freewwweb.. and a few others. It was sad when they went bust, but great to have free internet for a few years there. Sometimes I could get 8 or 10k downloads..
@@retrocet there weren't many ISPs that supported parallel connecting modems. ISTR one company made a shotgun modem that was two in one unit so it could work with a single 115K serial port.
Speaking of bugs, I had one 2400 baud modem that would accidentally trick the other end into using MNP 5 compression. I had to use a software implementation of MNP with it.
Those were the days! I was a bit of a late-comer to the BBS party, didn’t know about em as a kid in the 1980s - but they were a big part of my life in the early 90s. Even ran my own WWIV board as a pre-teen/early teens.
I worked with a guy who insisted on turning sound on, for years, from using 4.8 to 52k, especially when I had tech work near him. I was *so* happy to install ISDN.
1:23 "Bee-ee-ee, wuurrrh, didee, dideedi! Chrhrhrhhrrhrhhrhhrhrhhrhr" In '97 I think I had a 56K modem. I seem to recall if it reached the "wuurrrh", you were probably good from there.
@@RJARRRPCGP You could be right.. my download speeds usually maxed out at 3.something KB/s, which would point to the lower speeds. I probably just assumed 7KB/s was a theoretical maximum, and there were other bottlenecks or overheads. I didn't know the specs of the modems we had, but certainly over the time I was on dialup 56K modems were in existence, and if I'd realised that we only had 33K, I would have been very interested in upgrading.
I remember a 56k variant where there was only one 'bell' sound at end of training, and it was reversed (ramp-up instead of down). It might have been 56kFlex, but I remember it as being v90.
V.90 was unusual as a standard because it allowed the modem manufacturer to specify what audio pattern they wanted 'played' back to them in order to train their receiver. Thus V.90 handshakes from different modem makers could sound different.
@@retrocet Well, Now I Feel Good & Bad All At The Same Time. I Feel Good That Someone Else Remembers Telix & BBS's & Bad That I Didn't Recognize It After All Those Years. I Probably Need To Check Out What Other Retro Stuff You Do.
There is something magical about old computers' LCD screens that the new ones just can't match. I know it was bad, with very low refresh rates and pixel "ghosting" most of the time... but I have a feeling that it will be the next aesthetic aspect that new technology will try to mimic shortly (in the same sense that VHS fuzziness and chromatic aberration is being mimicked today). Awesome vid. Took me to a trip down the memory lane.
Oh the feels! Came in at 14.4. Not the earliest, but early enough to remember the hype when 28.8, 33.6, and OH MY GOD 56K! all came out. If you were good you had ISDN at 128K, but if you were _really_ hot shit, you had DSL at a ridiculous 100 MEGAbits! per second… and then broadband being marketed as “always on” buried dialup for good. Those were good days.
If your those lucky people in 2002, you would have road runner fiber optic home internet. It’s so fast that even the best consumer grade network adapters bottlenecks the connection speed you had to bite the bullet on enterprise grade NIC for your gaming PC to get the full benefits back then.
"buried dialup for good" not for ATM "machines" and POS "machines" were you put your credit card, they were still using Dial UP well into 2012 ! then they switched to broadband, aka, DSL1.0
@@monad_tcp Quite true, I suppose I should’ve specified for residential use. But many years ago I was rather surprised to hear a dial-up modem when swiping a mag-strip card.
After listening to these sounds so much I started to predict the speed and connection from the time the initial transaction took and the sound characteristics of that transaction. It was possible to -see- hear the difference between a 33.6 and 50.6 Kbps connection.
Back about ’77. I had 300 baud on a dialup Teletype. In the morning, it recieved work orders stored on the dispatch server. Afternoons, used it to place materials orders to the warehouse.
V.42bis compression algorithm used in V.90 connections was really good for compressing text files. From my experience it could achieve compression up to 90% for HTML files ... late in the night when servers were not so overloaded. Unfortunately it was useless for compressing JPG and GIF files, and since they were much larger portion of websites the gain from using V42bis compression was barely noticeable, but if you decided to serf without images on that's where it shined. All web browsers back then had option to turn off image loading, and web designers did care how their websites look without images ... Unfortunately those times are gone ... In end result you could have read whole site content before single image was been filed up. Yeah, you could see images being filled up line by line back then ... ;p
Now there are ads, so the page has to load in chunks that move the text and links around the page a good thirty times before the stupid pictures fully load. Somehow, inevitably, it's always an ad that moves to where you were trying to click. Automatically formatting pages piss me off. Somehow we've regressed, and calculating the layout of the website first is literally impossible...
I remember the excitement of running my own BBS and leaving the volume up when I would get callers. We would advertise our BBS on other ones with a forum. I'd lurk as a SysOp and initiate chats with people, some I still am friends with today. The Warez BBS' were the best to find I always found it crazy that people would connect for hours to upload 0 day stuff and tie up the line.
For everything except the 56K connection I'm using a Teltone TLS-4. It's basically a phone system in a box that would've been used to test phones back in the day. For the 56K connection I'm using a Teltone ILS-2000. The ILS-2000 does call handling, etc. just like the TLS-4, but of course uses digital connections to the client devices. I'm using a DIVA T/A ISDN terminal that has two analog ports on it to do the analog to digital conversion on the client side.
I used to work in a callcenter for an ISP doing tech support. I heard modems dialling out so so many times. Hearing some of these again (and the double-bong explanation for the 56k) is fantastic :D
Same! When we got to 56k it was an amazing difference! I had a coworker spend a huge amount for a home t-1 line. I think it was something around $1k/month in the late 90's.
I remember those days! Couldn't wait to get a 9600 back in the late 80s. early 90s. Supra, Zyxel, US Robotics,.... Most were proprietary back then. That was when a 100 megabyte hard drive was more then you would ever need! The Intimidator BBS
There's a great big brick of nostalgia haha. My parents still don't have any form of highspeed and they only had 24k dial up connection up until 2010 when they were finally able to get a 3G cell modem. I listened to this tone so many times that I could actually tell if anything had gone wrong mid way through, and also what kind of error had occurred.
I didn't have an acoustic coupler, but my first modem was a 300 baud Anchor Automation. It had a short 25 pin serial cable & DB25 permanently attached to it. It wasn't completely Hayes compatible, and it also couldn't autodial. You had to plug a telephone handset into the modem, dial the number, wait for the carrier tone, then manually flip a switch on the modem to get it to do the handshake and (hopefully) connect. It was considerably cheaper than the Hayes modem, and I was a starving college student. It worked good enough!
why does the V.90 56k have two bell sounds before it continues the training?
It's a part of the V.90 spec called the Digital Impairment Learning sequence (DIL). The analog (client) modem asks the digital (ISP) modem to send a set of symbols (sounds). When the analog modem receives those symbols, it can compare the sound it asked for and the sound it received to determine how it was degraded by any digital conversions along the path from the ISP, and then adjust the connection speed to compensate. How the digital signal is degraded might be affected by the CODEC used, things like Robbed Bit Signalling, etc.
The interesting thing here is that the V.90 spec doesn't actually specify what the DIL sounds should be, just that the digital modem should send whatever the analog modem asks for. The result is that it can sound quite different for different client modems. US Robotics modems tend to have those two 'BONG' sounds, while Rockwell chipsets have a weird sort of low-frequency feedback-loop sound that gets louder and louder. There's a bunch of different V.90 modem chipsets, and they all sound different.
@@retrocet that's really intresting, so it's to train the connection so that it can compensate for any analog to digital conversions and stuff right?
@@XENON2028 Yep! Technically it's to compensate for digital to analog conversions, as opposed to the other way around, but that's the gist.
@@retrocet ah ok, that makes sense
@@retrocet Wow, cool. I've only ever heard the Rockwell sounds I think. I didn't know there was others. I've not heard the two bongs before.
It's so weird hearing some of these playing so briefly; I'm used to the handshaking taking at least 30 seconds.
i thought that too, i had an awful copper phone line dangling from wood poles came in front of the house, then had to ran a cable all the to the back where the desk was.
I has 5G lolz
I remember the lousy connections too, and it really does take a lot longer. I've been replicating them with my RJ-11 to handset adapters in a few tests.
I'd like to find a reproducible way to artificially degrade a line and reproduce the longer handshakes.
@@retrocet two RJ-11 sockets and a couple spools worth of wire between them. You might want to stretch the loop out to your whole property boundary to get the most interference.
a 30 second handshake is too slow even using a 1400 baud.
I kept waiting for the "Welcome" sound from AOL at the end of the 56K connection 😄
"You've Got Mail!"
@@CableFlame “Goodbye!”
@@jkeelsnc Goodbye sweet Prince
Those sounds will be forever burned into my brain
@@jamesduncan6729 It will probably be the last thing I think of before I die.
The fact that someone invested its time to acuratelly transcribe the modem noises into subtitles, made me smile.
Laughed my ass off LOL, I might have a problem.
Same here the subtitles being on point and on cue was hilarious
Oh my god i'm so glad I read this comment, that is freaking hilarious. They are so accurate.
Boooooooooonnnnnnnng
@@litenantjv Deep words
Your actually reading the script. The sounds you hear are actually from Michael Winslow.
In 1982 I built a 300 baud modem from a schematic in Popular Electronics. The hard part was that I had to tune it and I had nothing to tune it with. So I called up a local BBS over and over and held down a key on the computer while I turned the potentiometer back and forth. It took several calls until by chance I hit the right frequency and the key echoed back.
Do you know if that schematic is available/archived online anywhere?
@@cr1901 All the Popular Electronics issues are archived online but I have no idea which one.
damm you legend
@@EpicSqu1rrel That's definitely how I felt at the time.
Haha genius! I ran a BBS in the late 80s on my 2400 modem :)
Not only the sounds, but the whole setup was nicely and neatly done, demonstrating the speed of the monitor renders, too. Excellent. 🎉
I'm glad you liked it!
Now try shoving a modern web page through that.
@@brodriguez11000 A magazine did a test (2-3 years back) where they found most modern webpages will not load (properly) on a 56K and many scripts will fail to execute and time out.
@@jamegumb7298 Sounds like the scripts are set to time out a lot sooner now, so that they don't take as long to proceed. Now, even ADSL at 14 Mbps down and 700 Kbps up, will be painful!
Too bad it was mislabeled. Modems were listed in BAUD rate until they reached 4800 Baud. Then they switched over to Bps. Reason is from what I understand, the US FCC has a limit of 2400 Baud on the telephone system. So they had to switch over to a digital to analog system to try to cram more bits flowing over the analog telephone system with only 4800 Baud available to fit all that info within it.
What most people don't realize is the hardest one of those to get working was the 56K connection since it requires digital on one side (hence the ISDN modem). BRAVO!
Umm.. as an ex-modem tech… I disagree. We use to setup back-to-back 56k links all day.. we even had a dialler (like this one) to do so.
It was all in the s-register setup. We also had 56k modem racks for bbs systems so they could run their systems too (over pstn… )
@@aususer415 The point is you can't just connect two consumer 56K modems to each other and get a 56k connection, unlike ALL prior standards where you could do that.
You need a digital to analog conversion in the mix to get the 56k class connection.
@@repatch43 Um.... yes you can. Did it all the time in the 90's.
@@kleetus92 Sorry, no you can't. You'll get a connection, but it won't be above 33k, sorry. The modes above 33k only worked because the modems knew that the source was digital and were able to detect levels based on that assumption. It just doesn't work in the pure analog domain.
Why would the OP have an ISDN modem in the mix for the 56k example?
@@repatch43 No idea, but in the last example, he has 3 modems out there so... He also used the 56K modem on the laptop side for all the examples with the exception of the 300 baud. didn't have 2 56k Externals. Where the logic falls apart is if it has to have an ISDN line to work, how the hell does it make it out of the house on POTS?
I remember upgrading from 14.4 to 56kbps and thinking “wow, I can download a 2.3Mb file in under 20 minutes? THIS IS SURELY THE FUTURE!”
I love how it progressively adds more stuff to the end, going from simple dial tones to the handshakes you hear with 56k. I was born at the peak of 56k and by the time I was old enough to use the family computer, we already had Charter cable internet.
Same lol
Charter is a specific phone company in your backwards country . Educated countries know the signal types by their actual names such as DSL, Cable TV, cellular 3G/4G/5G and fiber .
My early memories are of 14.4 Kbps modems attached to 486 DOS machines dialing into BBS systems. Nobody had Internet access yet.
Those sounds are seared into my memory, ever since using a 1200 baud dialup to Compuserve in the 80s and 2400 baud to 14.4k BBSes in the early 90s.
I had totally forgotten how fast it was to handshake and connect my first modem at 1200.
Wow, youve been searching kids on the internet for quite a while
I spent many an hour goofing around on dialup BBS's. Thats something kids today will never get to experience. Oh the fun that used to of been had on those things
@@gdfgdfgdggdhhgfgfh1271 Yeah, there will never again be anything like it -- even the early internet days didn't have that close-knit community feel of BBS's.
There weren't more than 4 or 5 of us computer & trekkie nerds in my own middle and high school, but we met so many other like-minded friends, thanks to our cities BBS scene. Quite the exclusive little community, before the internet popularized computers with the masses.
Same here! I long for those days when computers weren't cool. Everything seemed so much more special then. When you had to wait for something. Hey, I spent an entire weekend downloading this!
This is the kind of cool stuff I like to see on RUclips. Definitely V.90 56K was most familiar to me! I'm surprised to see how fast the connection process was at the lower baud rates though, I guess there was less to negotiate once the connection was made.
Yeah, the V.90 in particular is an eternity. I have a non-upgraded USR X2 modem that will connect to the I-modem using X2 instead of V.90, and it's a lot quicker, though obviously still a lot longer than, say, V.22.
@@retrocet how do you upgrade the modem? i have an 33.6 spotster and a 56k x2 too
US Robotics still hosts the files to do it. They're little DOS programs. For example: www.usr-emea.com/support/s-prod-template.asp?loc=emea&prod=sportster
@@retrocet I remember finding the upgrade files on a Russian website to get the ones USR wanted money for.
Ahh … 300 baud. It’s like I’m a freshman in high school again. Saved up and bought a 1200 within a year and half. Not just twice as fast but THREE TIMES faster. I could watch (and read and comprehend) the text fill the screen at 300 but 1200 was hard. And in college I went 2400 as that became affordable. Talk about light speed!
I was surprised by how long it took to connect with my 28.8 (not shown in the video, which skips from 14.4 to 33.6) as I’d been so used to the brevity of 2400 and slower. As compared to someone who only knew the faster modems with slower handshake process being surprised at how quickly the slower modems connected. I guess when you’re slow you’ve got no time to waste on longer handshakes.
Of course as soon as I bought my 28.8, 33.6 came out. FWIW, I recall my 28.8 sounding like the 33.6 (vs 14.4). Probably didn’t matter that I didn’t have faster as my phone line often had a little noise. Not much but enough that I didn’t always get full speed. A 33.6 or 56 would likely always have dropped down to a slower speed. Couldn’t wait to get my cable modem as soon as it was offered in town (2001).
Those were the days :) remember hosting my BBS and seeing my friends phone number with something weird like 1200/75 connection, calling him asking wtf he’s trying to connect with giving those weird setups… and him answering that he was screaming and whistling, thinking my BBS had pre-connection audio on. So apparently humans can successfully perform some of the modem handshakes.
Man that is really something to hear again... I started with a 300 baud and did the progression all the way to 56k in the late 80's early 90's dialing up friends BBS's (bulletin board systems for the kids out there... aka pre-internet). I remember adding *57 to turn off call waiting because it would crash the connection if someone called. One time I was about to dial into my Friday evening jaunt around the boards (I was only 18) and the phone rang right as I put my hand down to hit enter to dial... It was my parents calling saying they had a blowout on a tire and needed me to load up the spares for the truck and bring them out to them an hour from home. Had I been 5 seconds faster they'd never have gotten through and would have really been stuck for a few hours while I was online... I will never forget that!
Thank you for the memories!
Ahhh...the sounds of my entire childhood in one youtube video.
Back in the day of dialup, it was so nice to work nights in tech support and have sole access to a T3 line.
That hollow echo for 56K was the sweetest sound. Until line quality degraded and then it switched to the static with slightly quieter static for 33.6. If it repeated the static again, but without the quieter one, it was time to break and redial.
Reminds me of a buggy 56K modem that I also had, where it was notorious for randomly negotiating at 26.4 Kbps! That was on one of my PCs in 2004, IIRC.
I was terrified of these sounds as a kid. I could hear my parents using it in the next room after I’d gone to bed and had no idea what it was. To this day I still find it pretty creepy!
I don't know why but I find that so funny
Perfect example of how hiding a good part of life is a bad idea for bringing up children .
@@johndododoe1411 ???
@@johndododoe1411wut, that's such a bizarre leap
Id be scared of operating the bell 103 in a dark room
Love the double "bong" "bongs" sounds of the 56K. My childhood right there!
My last modem was 33.6, I never heard what 56k was like until just now! The bongs kind of scared me because I wasn't expecting them.
The bongs are specific to US Robotics modems. Rockwell/Conexant modems have a kind of warbling buzz instead. Lucent modems have a ticking sound.
@@steeviebops what about the integrated pci modems? as I sure remember that sound on aol dial up on a 98 Packard Bell machine
@@StereoMike06 I don't think I've ever seen a PCI US Robotics modem but I have two of their internal ISA modems and they sound the same as the external ones here.
I see the US Robotics. I worked for *Racal-Vadic* in the '70's. I help design the 9600 Bps Model. And was on the "Standards Comity" that help adopt the "at" command set.
ATZ AT&F1 ATDT....
You probably never imagined that the AT command sets would continue to live on well past modems!
A Racal Vadic 1200 baud modem was my first, complete with the non Hayes command set. Control E, enter, then… I can’t remember. Thanks for the memory, though. :)
The 56k dialup tone is really bringing back memories of using my mom’s clunky Dell laptop to connect to AOL and hop on RuneScape :)
My first ever interaction with a modem was in 1978 at the tender age of 15. We connected our high school DECwriter to a PDP-11 at 300 baud via an acoustic coupler. As I recall, there was a switch to select between 110 and 300 baud, so we had the fast setting. I still remember the modem sound along with that awesome dot-matrix sound of the DECwriter. That was a much simpler time. Thanks for the memories!
I remember "war-dialing" a server's modem bank to identify the various modem speeds by the connection sounds back in '97.
I had been given a couple of numbers in the sequence and started working my way up and down sequentially, finding that there were around 30 different lines available, and only ~10 had 56k, the rest were 33.6k modems.
Hearing the two "dong, dong" tones toward the end of the connection handshake was a moment of joy whenever I found them.
I think I still have the Diamond Supra Express 56k external modem, stuck in a box somewhere. A relic today, but it lasted through at least 3 or 4 computers back in the day, until cable modems finally replaced dial-up.
Woah! the Two dings meant that?! I never understood why i was downloading at 3.3kbps all the time when the modem said 56k!
@@Krzys_D Yeah, it was kind of a lottery back the times. Sometimes the two modem couldn't get any agreement and the connection broke. Online time was expensive in the mid 90s, so we checked our e-mails and disconnected as soon as they have been retrieved. Reading and answering have been done offline. Man, am I old! 😉
@@dynho_b I was going to say "You're not old, I remember all of that and I'm not old", and then I remembered I'm 40 now 😕
The double echo noise is digital impairment measuring. But yes, very distinctive.
It's fun watching this having previously watched a video breaking down what each tone is doing on the 56k and seeing how it progressed over the years into the more complex series of handshakes and screeches it ends up being at the end
how can I find that vid?
This sounds like something I want to see.
F
Ikr, they just tacked more stuff on at the end
@@NoNameAtAll2 it's called "Why Dial Up Sounds the Way it Does" by The Sacred Gamer here on YT
I used to work at US Robotics, this was my life for years, if I remember correctly the tail end of the connection that last swoosh sound on all the connections was the compression v42bis / MNP5. We used to be able to tell what the users connections were by ear. Back in the day before the 3 Com merger it was an amazing place to work at.
That's really cool! I remember thinking in high school that I'd want to work for USR someday. What did you do there, if you don't mind me asking?
It's amazing how sounds can invoke so many great memories. Being in on the relative beginnings of the internet was a great time!
Awesome! I had been hoping to finally hear all these recorded with the original equipment.
That's great to hear! I know there are a lot of videos already out there with a few modem sounds, but I really want to try to capture and document the original sounds using original equipment that you can actually see doing its thing (not that there's a ton to see), at least as much as my collection would allow. I'm glad you liked it!
@@retrocet it's history worth documenting. Subscribed.
back in mid 80s I used to dial up my local X25 access point and poke about the various institutions found on there. The access point modem had a very short initial carrier period before the line was disconnected. My 1200 baud modem couldn't respond that quickly so I became very adept at whistling the response tone into my handset keeping the other end responding while my modem caught up! I still can whistle that pure tone today.
Or you could of just brought as iPhone and WiFi like normal people
@@pyeltd.5457 he said in the mid 80s
@@pyeltd.5457 I'm pretty sure I had a PYE RTTY radio modem as well. Can't be 100% certain though. A local oddments shop had a myriad of used radio and telecoms equipment that I used to rummage through and buy.
Captain Crunch is that you?
@@pyeltd.5457 Lol, maybe if he was a time traveler...
“Why didn’t more people have internet back then?”
Not everyone could stand the noise.
Thanks for the nostalgia.
I ran a 2 line BBS in the mid-90s with a bunch of games both local and networked to other BBSes. I remember those sounds so well. I also remember the 'call outs' every night when our board would connect to various sites for mail and forums and other such. It got to the point that the normal modem noises didn't wake me up only the bad connection noises either from our call outs or one of our users calling in for some late night gaming. Hearing this takes me back.
Those were the days. I ran a "eleet" (yes the spelling is correct) BBS back in the day. 4 lines with the best 0 day out there ;-).
1:52 it's very interesting to see how they sound when measuring the phone line distance with this super short setup
I always wondered what that double-boing sound was in the V90 modems. Thanks for filling that gap in my knowledge.
@@icerunner its part of the error prevention stuffs iirc
Oh, that Modem sound! Dialing up "Bulletin Boards" in 1979! I didn't know the old modems ever got up to 14,400 or 33,600. Just right for my 386! Thanks!
Dang! You must've either been pretty wealthy to own such equipment or had access to government equipment to do that back then.
Oh boy, this has brought back some memories. Back in the day (somewhere around 2002) my school still had 56Kbps modems to connect us to the internet. They've upgraded to a DOCSIS cable modem in late 2004 as far as I can remember. We haven't had a proper internet connection at home until 2007, because it was prohibitively expensive. A 5/1Mbps ADSL would've costed something like 1/5th of my father's monthly wage, and the 768/312kbps ISDN was also not cheap either, plus the toll-free part of it was limited to something like 50 hours or 5 GBs if my mind serves me right. In 2007, a new ISP appeared at my location, which has offered a variety of FTTB services for low prices, and we got a 20/10 Mbps service in early September, 2007.
Fun fact: some 14 years later the ISP I've mentioned has hired me to work for them, lol.
I remember getting a 56k modem and it felt amazing at the time. Even if you had a 56k, you weren't guaranteed to get that speed. You had to be fairly close to a switching station, otherwise it would lower to 33.6 or 28.8.
Yeah 56k was just a fantasy for most folks
Sometimes it would lower to an intermediary level like 49K . Fortunately by that time I had upgraded to actual ISDN for everything until they shut that down around new years with only 2 months notice and no meaningful upgrade path .
This video pretty much sums up my early online years starting with and so it begins, 300 BPS to last the last stop before broadband, 56K. I'll always fondly remember those days -- in particular the "NO CARRIER" message when you were cut off suddenly while in the middle of doing something online by someone trying to make a call on a phone somewhere else in the house.
We had a second line to prevent that. Though we did have a couple 2-line phones (so we could call from the second line too if someone was on the phone), so I won't say it _never_ happened in our house.
"The connection was reset while the page was loading" error message from the web browser when disconnected. (Firefox, IIRC) And the modem is suddenly redialing.
1:40 - There's the sound that's etched into my memory. The good ol' days of AOL, though I can't say it miss it that fondly.
Wow, this brings back memories! The ones I’m most familiar with are the 33.6, 56k, and 2400 baud modem connection sounds. My first experience with internet was in the early 90s just before mass public recognition of internet. How far we’ve come!
The same speeds I used. All in 1999, in fact. The parents took the main computer away, but I had another with a Hayes 2400B. Useless for web browsing with images, but enough to chat on IRC.
About a year ago, I had a Courier modem and a VOiP over Google Voice. It was fun being able to log into the dial-up BBS's that are still around. Heck even NetZero worked for a bit.
Was that hard to set up??
@@midixiewrecked7011 It wasn't too bad. I did have to set up the latency and echo cancellation settings in the VOiP settings. That's really the only tricky part.
I remember these sounds well and still have a few external US Robotics modems pictured at the beginning of the video and even a couple older ones back when they were five times bigger than the ones shown. I have a whole box full of old 56k internal modems (PCI) salvaged from old PC's. Fastest dial-up speed I ever had was 48k but it typically hovered in the 38k - 42k range. When I finally sprung for a dedicated dial-up line I thought I was in the big league. That was back when a 100 MB file was considered a "huge download"... lol
38Kbps-to-42Kbps, sounds like mine on a very bad day! I usually at least leaned towards 45 Kbps. Albeit it often was 40 Kbps in the Cavendish/Chester woody area. (also Weathersfield) The Weathersfield one was the worst for me! Modem seemed to not like it, lower bandwidth and higher ping, IIRC.
I had a us robotics 56k but it had some silent mode (ok last time I used that modem was in 2002). It was a weird modem, download speed and ping in games was much faster than it should have been.
@@kaiosun I likely sadly had a higher ping in Cavendish, Chester and Weathersfield than in the town of Windsor. (Vermont)
@@RJARRRPCGPAh, I thought you were talking England .
brings a tear to my eye, some of the most exciting times of my childhood were me and my brothers firing up a sesh with those noises.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I purposely kept dial-up internet until 2006, so I wouldn't waste too much time online. :-)
Great historical value 👍
Thank you! That's what I'm going for here, at least aside from giving myself a nostalgia hit. I really want this modem collection to be a living exhibit of this era of tech
It's cool to see videos comparing dial-up modem sounds. Unfortunately, I never experienced the nostalgia with dialup, due to me only starting to get internet in the early 2000s, when broadband internet started to be a thing.
The sound is super nostalgic for me and I imagine a lot of people around my age. I mean, I switched to cable net as soon as I possibly could, but there was something to be said about dialing up a BBS or the net - hearing the sound that was a prelude to fun.
The feeling reminds me of the way the startup sound of a Gameboy or Playstation makes me feel.
@@retrocet Yeah now that I think about it the dial-up tone sounds like you’re about to be taken to another dimension or something lol
Sucks to be you nerd. 😋
We had dialup well until I was like 4 or 5; I never experienced it myself, but my mom would use the computer everyday for work and I'd always get a kick out of the sound whenever she went on
You didn't miss much, it was extremely slow and disconnections were too common.
We recently switched away from the old US robotics 56k modems for long distance tank gauging to an Ethernet connection. The dial-up sound was dreaded, because it meant it was having a hard time connecting or the automatic tank gauge was down. Which meant you had to send a runner to get the levels, or manually stick the tanks. If you were working the control center, it meant you were in for a long night doing extra math, determining the problem, and calling in a work order.
Brings back memories of working for an ISP in the 1990s. Most of the time I'd just ask the customer to be quiet for a moment and turn their modem's volume up. I could usually diagnose the issue just by listening to the noises.
My first modem was V23 - 1200/75, used to access Prestel from the BBC Micro back around 1983. Many other modems followed. Listening to the connection handshaking and then the silence was always a magical moment.
1200/75 was the inspiration for the asymmetry in ADSL, squeezing out max download speed at the cost of upload speeds that would only carry keyboard input and URLs most of the day .
I love that Cobalt cube of yours! So cool.
Thanks for sharing this blast from the past.
I'm glad you liked it!
Now there is something I haven’t seen myself since school back in ~2001, guess it’s been a few years by now, and as I recall the specs of the cobalt cube were pretty meager even by the standards of when it was made. :)
That laptop is the one I grew up with; it‘s the reason I went into IT, the reason for where I am now. Thanks for sharing the video :)
Thanks for checking it out!
I love that laptop to bits, it was the one I had in high school and it also motivated my career a lot too. Though, the one I had in high school was the CS with the dual-scan screen and no CD drive. I upgraded when I started recollecting my old machines again ;)
oh the nostalgia this had on me, thank you so much for posting this, as a kid from the 80's and 90's this brought me so much joy! It reminded me how we had to wait until midnight to dial because you didn't need to pay for pulses after midnight, those were the days!!!
Those sounds are forever burnt into my memory. I used to be able to identify the 14.4, 28.8, and 33.6 handshakes based on some of the minor differences.
Me too!
Meanwhile I never got to hear the 56k handshake IRL, since we never got around to buying a 56K modem. Fastest we had was 33.6k before we went to broadband in 2000.
@@cybhunter007 I did, because my family's Pentium 133 system that was made in 1996, had a 28.8K modem, LOL. Literally connected with that modem in 2001 to connect to the motherboard manufacturer's web site for the motherboard of my crash-city first-Athlon build, (T-bird 900 MHz with Soyo SY-K7VTA-B motherboard with buggy BIOS) where it kept freezing at defaults!
My first modem was a Commodore 1670 1200 baud modem in 1987. My next modem was a 28.8 Packard Bell internal sound card/modem (1996). The next was a U.S. Robotics 33.6 Sportster external modem (1997 or 1998), and the last modem was a U.S. Robotics 56K V.90 internal modem. I remember the sounds they made well.
Where I live, around 1988 AT&T started selling used "official" 1200 baud modems (from the years before when you had to have a phone company modem) for cheap. They had originally cost several hundred dollars.
Amiga 500 was mine.
Dial up modems make some of my favourite sound effects of all time.
That, was a trip down memory lane. My first modem was a 300 baud Vicmodem hooked to a commodore VIC-20.
I remember moving up through the tech and eventually feeling jealous of a friend with his really expensive hayes 56K smartmodem.
300bps? Auto dial? Luxury! I started with 110bps, and I had to dial the phone. 😉
Of course we had it tough, amateur RTTY at 45.45 baud! 😆
Love the display of the sent text, visually shows the evolution in speed super well lol
I ran every one of those speeds on my C-64 and A-500 as well as 16.8, 19.2, and 28.8 until replacing them in 1996 with an actual IBM. It was very shortly after that we got Roadrunner in the area. I was in high cotton then downloading a 5 meg test file in 45 seconds.
I used to run a BBS back in the 90s. You just ran through my childhood. Always loved the BONG BONG BONG 28.8 added.
My first modem was 2400 baud. Gradually bought faster modems over the years. It was such an event to login to my favorite BBS's. Those were the simple days. Thank you for sharing this video!
Yeah, those were the days! Do you remember the FreeNet movement where nonprofit community organizations sought to provide free service to local users? Users dialed in for free (local call) and you can get a free email/user account. And that’s where I got my first internet account to get mail etc. I wonder if FreeNet community still exists
Edit: ok so I found this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-net?wprov=sfti1
Love this! I remember K56Flex too, it sounded like an extended V.34 handshake.
thanks for the captioning, deaf people really can just hear the magic with the incredible detail of the sounds
I didn't have the Bell modem, but I had every one of the US Robotics modems you displayed. Man what a flashback....thank you!
Thanks for checking it out!
So many happy memories in a 2 minute video. Thanks for the upload!
Thanks for checking it out!
Neat. I wish modems connected that quickly in real life. I always seemed to have a crappy phone connection, and even 9600 baud modems would take forever to finish the handshake.
Back in 1998 or so, having a US Robotics modem meant you were a baller. Nostalgic sounds and refreshing to hear 20 plus years later.
Thank you for this video, and the memories it brought back. Before the fax machine, my office had a quip machine, in the mid 80’s. It was a drum like a cylinder with the 8 1/2 x 11 paper wrapped around it. The drum would spin making a “quip~quip” sound. It would smell funny too, took a long time to send each page. Amazing how technology has changed just over the last few decades.
Had modem at my house until 2003 when we got fiber. Grandma had modem until 2010 when she passed.
If internet wasnt filled with unnecessary images it would probably be usable today for browsing.
Mostly used it to google basic facts and recipes at grandmas house. Which it did okay.
My dad always told the story of how his 33k modem was faster than the 56k. I never really understood how.
@@bossmorley3083 and 3G is faster than a brain
@@pyeltd.5457 Fiber? That was unavailable until 2013 for me.
Unique stuff! Loved it. Thanks so much for setting these configs up and creating the video 💜
u still use serial connections?
why so many freaks here, got lost, mad?
That Cobalt machine is gorgeous, and brings back so many memories. In college I cut my teeth programming on SGI Indigo workstations, and then later some O2 ones.
Further studies included machines such as an SGI Onyx (was used for teaching low level multiprocessing). It's wild to think how much different it is now that I can just import Python's multiprocessing library-instead of dealing with hardware spinlocks.
Wow very cool demonstration! Never thought about how each connection speed sounded different. And seeing the data render on the screen at different speeds was a great idea. These sounds really bring back memories of simpler times! Excellent video!
you still use serial communication? on what bit rate? Space, boats?
Why you need this still?????
@@lucasrem Of course, I use 56k dial up for all my internet browsing. Just yesterday, I went to google and the page is almost loaded already!
I originally got connected around 1996 (I think) when my Dad got a workplace laptop that had a 28K Gold Card PCMCIA modem from what I recall. After a few years, he had it upgraded to a 56K Flex modem, which I recall he had to get firmware to convert it to be V90 capable. The most common connection speeds I had were 9600, 28K (old modem), 33.6K (until the ISP got 56K) and 40-45.3K thereafter. For about 6 months around the year 2000, we were stuck at 9600 due to noise on our phone line until we finally managed to get an engineer out. Back then, data was not considered a necessity, so most support calls ended up going nowhere as they would just do a remote end-to-end connectivity test and deem the issue not a line fault.
Between 2003 and 2005, I had satellite ADSL, which used a satellite dish based connection for the downlink and a dial-up modem for the upload. That gave me 300Kbps down and about 28Kbps up from what I recall and a 1.5GB / 300 hour monthly allowance (which ever used up first). In 2005, we got ISDN installed to let us use the phone and Internet simultaneously, which also gave 64Kbps up in combination with the 300Kbps satellite based download. To my surprise, our exchange got DSL enabled 3 months after the ISDN installation, which required removing the ISDN line due to order DSL! That took several months. I had DSL right up until 2018 and now use a 4G based Internet connection due to DSL being limited to 5Mbps with my rural location.
Remember all of these sounds, awesome collection! Oh boy, I'm getting old...
Old is when one whips out the telegraph key and sends Morse code to each other. :-D
The person that did the captions has had that worked out for decades and has been waiting patiently for the time to put it to use
Absolutely love the subtitles. Now I finally know what these machines are saying to eachother
Cheers from the Netherlands
I miss the one modem that had a bug in it and was dubbed the screaming cat modem.
I had a modem that had a bug in it I used for my Amiga 500 that would max out at 600 baud but sometimes it would bug out and
connect at 1200 baud and sometimes it would work!
Around that time Microsoft introduced the multilink protocol so if we had multiple phone lines in the house we could use multiple modems and
double the speed of our data transmission by dedicating 2 modems for data in and 2 modems data out.
It was really great back then. Then Juno came out for free dialup email service then another in the 90's came out with free dialup internet.
I abused those services like crazy. Dialing in then using a hack program to hide the ads in which they demanded to stay at the top of your monitor to show
banner ads.
Was the free ISP NetZero? I also remember trying to get around the ads, though the best part of NetZero was being able to play Diablo II online for free when I was on the road. Good times.
I never got to shotgun two modems like that! That's super cool! I always wanted to try it - I've been thinking about trying to set it up here at home and I have a quad 56K modem card on the way that I'm hoping to install into the Qube to try it out.
There was also freewwweb.. and a few others. It was sad when they went bust, but great to have free internet for a few years there. Sometimes I could get 8 or 10k downloads..
@@retrocet there weren't many ISPs that supported parallel connecting modems. ISTR one company made a shotgun modem that was two in one unit so it could work with a single 115K serial port.
Speaking of bugs, I had one 2400 baud modem that would accidentally trick the other end into using MNP 5 compression. I had to use a software implementation of MNP with it.
You know.. Juno?
dat 2400 baud, my childhood dialing into the local BBSes... it was a simpler and fun time for sure.
Those were the days! I was a bit of a late-comer to the BBS party, didn’t know about em as a kid in the 1980s - but they were a big part of my life in the early 90s. Even ran my own WWIV board as a pre-teen/early teens.
the subtitles.. are beautiful. literally tears in my eyes. well done
I worked with a guy who insisted on turning sound on, for years, from using 4.8 to 52k, especially when I had tech work near him. I was *so* happy to install ISDN.
1:23 "Bee-ee-ee, wuurrrh, didee, dideedi! Chrhrhrhhrrhrhhrhhrhrhhrhr"
In '97 I think I had a 56K modem. I seem to recall if it reached the "wuurrrh", you were probably good from there.
'97=Probably 33.6 Kbps or 28.8 Kbps.
@@RJARRRPCGP You could be right.. my download speeds usually maxed out at 3.something KB/s, which would point to the lower speeds.
I probably just assumed 7KB/s was a theoretical maximum, and there were other bottlenecks or overheads.
I didn't know the specs of the modems we had, but certainly over the time I was on dialup 56K modems were in existence, and if I'd realised that we only had 33K, I would have been very interested in upgrading.
I remember a 56k variant where there was only one 'bell' sound at end of training, and it was reversed (ramp-up instead of down). It might have been 56kFlex, but I remember it as being v90.
V.90 was unusual as a standard because it allowed the modem manufacturer to specify what audio pattern they wanted 'played' back to them in order to train their receiver. Thus V.90 handshakes from different modem makers could sound different.
It's cool as someone born after the year 2000 to see these things work, I knew they existed but I never knew what they looked like or how they worked.
Yeah, Man! Remember Telix & BBS's? Good Times!
Hell yeah. The laptop on the right is actually running Telix! I just turned off the status and menu bars for the video ;)
@@retrocet Well, Now I Feel Good & Bad All At The Same Time. I Feel Good That Someone Else Remembers Telix & BBS's & Bad That I Didn't Recognize It After All Those Years. I Probably Need To Check Out What Other Retro Stuff You Do.
@@thewatcher5271 Nah, don't feel bad. Without the menus it's just a bunch of DOS text, really. You'd recognize it with the normal UI I bet.
I remember getting online at 3am and trying not to wake the whole house with 56k modem sounds.
Whoever did the subtitles for this video, i appreciate you
There is something magical about old computers' LCD screens that the new ones just can't match. I know it was bad, with very low refresh rates and pixel "ghosting" most of the time... but I have a feeling that it will be the next aesthetic aspect that new technology will try to mimic shortly (in the same sense that VHS fuzziness and chromatic aberration is being mimicked today).
Awesome vid. Took me to a trip down the memory lane.
Oh the feels! Came in at 14.4. Not the earliest, but early enough to remember the hype when 28.8, 33.6, and OH MY GOD 56K! all came out. If you were good you had ISDN at 128K, but if you were _really_ hot shit, you had DSL at a ridiculous 100 MEGAbits! per second… and then broadband being marketed as “always on” buried dialup for good. Those were good days.
If your those lucky people in 2002, you would have road runner fiber optic home internet. It’s so fast that even the best consumer grade network adapters bottlenecks the connection speed you had to bite the bullet on enterprise grade NIC for your gaming PC to get the full benefits back then.
"buried dialup for good" not for ATM "machines" and POS "machines" were you put your credit card, they were still using Dial UP well into 2012 ! then they switched to broadband, aka, DSL1.0
@@monad_tcp Quite true, I suppose I should’ve specified for residential use. But many years ago I was rather surprised to hear a dial-up modem when swiping a mag-strip card.
@@davidperry4013 OH WOW I’d completely forgotten about RR and the LPBs that used them for online gaming domination!
100 Mb back in the late-1990s and the early-2000s, were only for very big organizations, where I am.
After listening to these sounds so much I started to predict the speed and connection from the time the initial transaction took and the sound characteristics of that transaction.
It was possible to -see- hear the difference between a 33.6 and 50.6 Kbps connection.
That is so true. I had all speeds except the 300. And you could definitely predict the speed.
Thank you so much for subtitling this. It really helps to pick out the sounds! (And also is funny!)
Back about ’77.
I had 300 baud on a dialup Teletype.
In the morning, it recieved work orders stored on the dispatch server.
Afternoons, used it to place materials orders to the warehouse.
V.42bis compression algorithm used in V.90 connections was really good for compressing text files. From my experience it could achieve compression up to 90% for HTML files ... late in the night when servers were not so overloaded. Unfortunately it was useless for compressing JPG and GIF files, and since they were much larger portion of websites the gain from using V42bis compression was barely noticeable, but if you decided to serf without images on that's where it shined. All web browsers back then had option to turn off image loading, and web designers did care how their websites look without images ... Unfortunately those times are gone ...
In end result you could have read whole site content before single image was been filed up. Yeah, you could see images being filled up line by line back then ... ;p
Now there are ads, so the page has to load in chunks that move the text and links around the page a good thirty times before the stupid pictures fully load. Somehow, inevitably, it's always an ad that moves to where you were trying to click.
Automatically formatting pages piss me off. Somehow we've regressed, and calculating the layout of the website first is literally impossible...
@@pontiacg445 Ad block exists now fortunately so its not all bad in modern times.
Ah the days of Flash.
As a matter of fact. The V.42bis compression often made jpg files *larger* due to the added overhead!
Subtitles are great
I remember the excitement of running my own BBS and leaving the volume up when I would get callers. We would advertise our BBS on other ones with a forum. I'd lurk as a SysOp and initiate chats with people, some I still am friends with today. The Warez BBS' were the best to find I always found it crazy that people would connect for hours to upload 0 day stuff and tie up the line.
The automatic subtitles are just perfect 👌
Awsome setup and memories!
What equipment did you use simulate POTS (plain old telephone system) line
For everything except the 56K connection I'm using a Teltone TLS-4. It's basically a phone system in a box that would've been used to test phones back in the day.
For the 56K connection I'm using a Teltone ILS-2000. The ILS-2000 does call handling, etc. just like the TLS-4, but of course uses digital connections to the client devices. I'm using a DIVA T/A ISDN terminal that has two analog ports on it to do the analog to digital conversion on the client side.
If you don't have closed caption enabled for this video, you're missing out on the best part. Bravo.
I used to work in a callcenter for an ISP doing tech support. I heard modems dialling out so so many times. Hearing some of these again (and the double-bong explanation for the 56k) is fantastic :D
Oh the memories!!! Thanks for posting this! I started at 2400bps when I was a kid.
Same! When we got to 56k it was an amazing difference! I had a coworker spend a huge amount for a home t-1 line. I think it was something around $1k/month in the late 90's.
Nice setup, and interesting to hear how fast a handshake was done in the early days. The subtitles are the best! :-)
I love that the actual data being transferred is just a mock-Dankpods microphone test and ASCII art of Frank
;)
I remember those days! Couldn't wait to get a 9600 back in the late 80s. early 90s. Supra, Zyxel, US Robotics,.... Most were proprietary back then. That was when a 100 megabyte hard drive was more then you would ever need!
The Intimidator BBS
There's a great big brick of nostalgia haha. My parents still don't have any form of highspeed and they only had 24k dial up connection up until 2010 when they were finally able to get a 3G cell modem.
I listened to this tone so many times that I could actually tell if anything had gone wrong mid way through, and also what kind of error had occurred.
I didn't have an acoustic coupler, but my first modem was a 300 baud Anchor Automation. It had a short 25 pin serial cable & DB25 permanently attached to it. It wasn't completely Hayes compatible, and it also couldn't autodial. You had to plug a telephone handset into the modem, dial the number, wait for the carrier tone, then manually flip a switch on the modem to get it to do the handshake and (hopefully) connect. It was considerably cheaper than the Hayes modem, and I was a starving college student. It worked good enough!