Wow, this is a blast from the past. I played most of the wav files on this site and I think they're really neat.
Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#12Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends? Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.
I vaguely recall my family treating the link coming up at any less than 48k as a "hang up and try again" situation (possibly dialing into a different local access number). We did once move into a rental house where we couldn't get better than maybe 28k or 36k, but after a technician came out and swapped which pair of wires we were connecting through we had a much more stable connection that I think was operating at 56k more often than not.
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#13One of my first tech jobs as a teenager in high school involved a lot of resetting ATI modems connected to portmasters as they oveheated at an isp in the mid 90s. Recently used a related one as a sample in a song for a friend about that era. Three sounds you won't hear today that defined the early 90s for us, a zippo lighter, an x.25 dialup number, and a 1200baud modem handshake
(though may have used 300 for the sample), and then a simple triangle wave. was called "requiem for a hacker." I still can't believe the shit we did when we were kids.
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#14These are cool, but most all of this happened after I had transitioned over to DSL, so it doesn't really tickle my nostalgia. The quintessential modem sounds to me will always be V.32, V.32bis, and TPEP.
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#15Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends? Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.
In the US reaching 56k was not possible. Sending at 56k required transmit levels above those allowed by the FCC. The maximum in the US over a perfect line was 53.3k. During that era I had a dedicated dual channel 128k ISDN connect at home provided by my work but while traveling I would occasionally get a 53.3k connection but 48k was more normal.
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#16In college I had a 300 baud connection to a school PDP-11, with a phone handset coupler. The modem dropped the connection constantly so the handshake connect was constant. And those sounds were increasingly annoying. You whippersnappers with your always on internet have no idea how tough it was for us brave pioneers.
300 baud modems used frequency shift keying, meaning they generated two different sounds for 0 and 1 bits. The sound frequencies were high enough that the receiving modem didn't need a full 1/300 of a second to decide if it was getting a 0 or a 1.
Based on that, if you had a good phone connection it was possible to reconfigure the UARTs on both ends to operate at 450 baud instead of 300. This gave you a 50% increase in speed!
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#17I used to hate that screeching noise so much I cut the wire to the internal speaker of my first modem (1200 baud)
For subsequent modems (speed upgrades) I had learned the about Hayes AT command set and init script would mute the internal speaker for peace of mind.
Personally for me, this modem noise is as bad as fingernails screeching down a blackboard!
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#18We had a bank of dial-ins to the college back in the 90's. I loved the old US Robotics equipment.
I use a modem sound file for my wake up sound. It gets you out of bed mighty quickly.
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#19I used to hate that screeching noise so much I cut the wire to the internal speaker of my first modem (1200 baud) For subsequent modems (speed upgrades) I had learned the about Hayes AT command set and init script would mute the internal speaker for peace of mind. Personally for me, this modem noise is as bad as fingernails screeching down a blackboard!
I always kept the speaker on at low volume. After the initial connection was established, it just sounded like background/white noise. I could tell how good the connection was, the general speed, and of course could hear other things like incoming call waiting.
Re: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
#20One of my first tech jobs as a teenager in high school involved a lot of resetting ATI modems connected to portmasters as they oveheated at an isp in the mid 90s. Recently used a related one as a sample in a song for a friend about that era. Three sounds you won't hear today that defined the early 90s for us, a zippo lighter, an x.25 dialup number, and a 1200baud modem handshake (though may have used 300 for the samp…
OMG. Livingston Portmasters. Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.
- fellow ISP modem lackey (but USR Couriers, not shit ATI, thank God)