The undersigned lived (and suffered) in that era. Internet connection With a telephone modem, and of course, like me, many of you will remember that particularly noisy sequence of beeps that happened just before we surfed the Internet at great speeds, for example, 56 kbps.
Those mythical baud times and AT commands had their charm, but many of you may not know that those characteristic connection words weren’t funny at all: they were the modem’s way of “negotiating” communication with the Internet service provider.
The beeps create the so-called handshake, the “digital handshake” that makes the two ends of the communication agree on different parameters (such as the transmission speed that we will enjoy) when connecting to the Internet.
Some time ago, a Finnish programmer named Ona Raisanen analyzed that sequence of beeps to provide a more in-depth explanation of what happened during the conversation. The result was this unique image:
As he explained himself, there are several stages to the negotiation. First, it was checked what the emitted ringtone was or not a modemAnd also the remote modem responds with a different tone which allows us to recognize the modem as such.
From that point on, binary data was exchanged in short bursts and they got rid of options like echo suppression, which was useful in voice calls between people but which, since they weren’t present, allowed full-duplex communication to be taken advantage of (both modems “talking” at the same time).
Then came what for many was the most important thing: finding a suitable modulation for that communication, something that determined the speed we would get in the transmission.
The curious situation was that in some organizations the “server” modems can be of different speeds, so if you try Connect to those nodes And if you didn’t do it at the speed you expected, you can always disconnect and try to connect to the “good” modem again.
It made up for it, as the difference between a 14.4 kbps or 28.8 kbps connection was obvious Not to mention whether 56 kbps lines were available. There were many users who could detect whether the connection was being made at a high or slow speed just by hearing the beep tone.
past tense
As Raisanen explained, it was normal for these sounds to be audible at the time: telephone lines were used for audio communication, even the first modems. was connected to the telephone set to establish contact. The hero of ‘Wargames’ (‘Wargames’, 1983, John Badham), David Lightman (played by Matthew Broderick), used this type of modem to connect to various systems. The note change view is simply brilliant and accurately shows that connection process.
There was an easy way to disable that noise, of course: send the ATM0 command on the serial line used by the modem to achieve a silent connection.
Although they became especially popular in the 90s, there were modems that laid the foundation for this type of device earlier. In 1981, the Hayes SmartModem was introduced, which ended up standardizing AT commands, such as controlling a transmission parameter mentioned above.
These first devices had very limited speeds of 1,200 and 2,400 bits per second – today it is not uncommon to have lines 40,000 times faster at speeds in excess of 100 Mbit per second.
Later, modems appeared 9,600, 14,400, 28,800 or 56,000 bitsAnd indeed the latter was a real technical breakthrough considering that twisted pair lines were not designed for this: they have been with us for a century and were invented by someone you must know: Alexander Graham Bell.
Modems have become objects of study and almost worship. Some of the first users who dedicated themselves to posting web pages to the Internet had already documented the possibilities of these devices quite extensively, and this 1997 document by Nils Jonker is a good example.
That path of connection is now history. AOL, which for years was synonymous with dial-up access in the United States, will discontinue its modem connection service on September 30, 2025, after more than three decades. According to data from the 2019 US Census, about 265,000 people are still using only this type of connection in the country. In Spain, copper has also been left behind: Telefónica stopped marketing ADSL in April 2024 and scheduled the closure of its last copper exchange on May 29 of that year, when there were still around 440,000 ADSL subscribers.
All this makes it clear: those beeps weren’t just noise. They make a lot more sense than it seems.
Picture | Navy Medicine
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