I love this kind of stuff. The fact that we (people in our field; not me specifically) had to and could do stuff like this must seem crazy ancient to the younger folks here. I did boot my first computer from a cassette tape, and I can still remember what it sounded like and it's so, so very nostalgic. And many of us did get our first internet access via these crazy noises as well. I'm sure I could also listen to a modem connecting and tell you what speed it had negotiated from 1200baud all the way up to 56k, since each new sound was, at one point, the pinnacle of excitement since I'd just upgraded to something new (and then I heard it thousands of times).
You will enjoy this classic.
It's a lovely image showing the dialup handshake . My first modem was a Hayes 1200 baud. Every modem after seemed to double. The protocols got better too. Bidirectional transfers, wow.
My first modem was a Hayes-brand 300 baud modem. Atari 800 computer.
So I'll kindly ask you to get off my lawn, whipper-snapper.
(BTW I listen to a lot of ambient / noise / drone music, and a while ago, some artist took those modem sounds, slowed them down, put in some reverb, etc. and it was downright ghostly).
The fun things about 300 baud was I could pick up the phone and hear the individual keystrokes being sent. I couldn't distinguish what particular character was being sent, unless of course I was the one typing.
Same here. I loaded programs from cassette tape into a Soviet clone of a Sinclair computer. Each program started with some sort of a loader block that produced a constant pitch. I would use a screwdriver to adjust the magnetic read head of the cassette player and listen for the pitch to be just right during the loader block in order to get the actual program to load correctly. Good memories.
When I first saw an ad for a "soon to be released" 9600 bps modem, I excitedly mentioned it on a local BBS, where all of the older wiser users told me it was impossible and the ad must have been a joke. 1200 baud was still relatively new at the time and error prone even with a parity bit so I could understand some of their skepticism. The central offices were still in the process of being converted over to digital and lines were still noisy at times. As the quality of the local loop improved, so did modem speeds.
Well never can afford one then. Did saw many a couple of years which use this to win 7! It finally come at end as the patch of win 10 s too large to bear. But nice to see some 56k us robotics after so many decades.
I always hated that damn modem screeching sound. I once popped off the speaker on the modem itself, because it was so annoying.
And then I recall, there was always a commercial playing on the radio, that had that sound. Maybe it was for the now dead U.S. Robotics. I can’t recall.
I could tell what speed my first modem connected at because my DEC modem had a physical switch to select between 300 and 1200 baud. It also had a physical switch between line and data: no acoustic coupler required for this baby.
