Snippet: That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound ☇

Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic shares something I can get nostalgic over…I always left the modem sound on with most of my computers, so that if the connection didn’t work, I could hear why (busy signal, disconnect, etc.), and listening to the sound clip does immediately make me think of connecting to my ISP on my PowerBook 540c’s 19.2kbps modem. The most fun? Figuring out a local number for my ISP with one of their partner providers when I was on the road—almost like an early version of roaming (via Daring Fireball):

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.