The Sounds of Tech Past 231
itwbennett writes "If you're of a certain generation, the screech of a modem, the stuttering song of the dot matrix printer, and the wet slap of a mimeograph machine can transport you to simpler (or at least slower) times. JR Raphael has rounded up 20 tech sounds on the brink of extinction for your listening torture. We're only sorry we don't have smell-o-vision to bring you that sweet mimeograph scent."
Comment follows (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice
A nice fun article (annoyingly presented for maximum ad viewing as usual) although they were kind of stretching near the end.
I’ll add is what I can only refer to as “the CRT sound”. That little “vwhoom” you hear when you turn them on and “ktchuck” when you turn them off (onomatopoeia is fun!).
Also the sounds stereo equipment used to make when you turned it on (relays clicking, various feedback sounds similar to the CRT up there) and the satisfying clicks all the various switches and knobs made (I still have a microwave that has physical dials and buttons on it in the basement.. I dare not turn it on!).
oh my word (Score:5, Interesting)
On the whole I consider myself a peaceful person. But JR Raphael, well something bad should happen to him for this. Make a list of "sounds" - based on a couple I saw this meant grasping pretty far to make sure the list made it to twenty. Why twenty? Because that is 10 pages worth. 2 "sounds" per page. Then just search youtbue for a video that included each sound. But don't actually watch all of the video. Instead just slap them up there so people can watch a 64 second video of a floppy drive that only has the floppy drive sound for 20 seconds or so. Or the sound of a slide projector, with a guy talking about the fact that it functions, I assume he made the video to help sell the projector. The topper was enjoying the 'sound' of a mimeograph machine while the video blasted Cat Stevens into my ears. It's like a test for the Sucker's Showcase (my favorite skit from Steve Martin's Best Show Ever [imdb.com]). If you actually look at all 10 pages you qualify. Me, I bailed at the 5th page so I'm guessing that means I'm only mildly retarded.
Re:Comment follows (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Comment follows (Score:5, Interesting)
As I was looking through this article I was thinking:
- I still use a CRT.
- I still use a modem.
- I still use floppies.
- I still use a wired phone that makes dialtone hum.
- And there are still some TV stations that sign-off at night with an anthem.
The sounds I miss are actually much OLDER than these sounds. Like a rotary dial phone. The 1-minute warmup time of an old tube TV (a high-pitched hum). The "thunk" sound of an old record player changer. The "whirr" of a VCR's metal drums against magnetic tape while it records a television show. The sounds of Atari games filling the living room (1970s/early 80s).
Oh, the smell! (Score:3, Interesting)
In 1970 I was a print jockey feeding six IBM 1403 printers, producing junk mail. When I got home from work I needed a shower before my wife would come near me. The printer dust thrown off as the forms cycled through the printers filled our lungs, clogged our nasal passages, and permeated our clothing.
One sound Gen-X'ers may remember (Score:4, Interesting)
Two words:
1. Filmstrips
2. Beep
(For all you whippersnappers on my lawn, instead of watching actual movies, we'd watch essentially a roll of slide film that was projected, and the accompanying audio, on either tape or LP, would have the narrator pause, then a "BEEP" was made to indicate it was time for the oh-so-important (*cough*) member of the AV squad (only person who could be trusted to load the projector properly) to advance one frame).
Inside a strowger telephone exchange (Score:5, Interesting)
Strowger (step by step electromechanical) telephone exchanges were still in use in Britain right into the early 1990s. Our local exchange was one right up to about 1990, and it always seemed to like adding line noise to any call you made using a modem.
A now retired work colleague used to be a telecom engineer, and he worked on these machines when they were still in large exchanges (right into the late 1980s!). There is nothing electronic about these telephone switches, they are literally physical switches. The machine that makes the tones (dialing tone, busy tone, number unobtainable, exchange busy, ringing tone) is not an electronic oscillator, it is a huge machine driven by a DC motor with a bunch of switches to make the cadence of the various tones (I guess the actual tone is made by a contact disc and wipers) - it's called a Ringer 2A.
The stuff that connects calls is an intricate network of physical switches. When you lift the handset, a stepper motor driven uniselector finds you a free first selector. This too is an electromechanical machine, with a bunch of relays and a bidirectional switch which can make one of 100 contacts. When you dial, the wiper steps up to the level you dial (so dial a 3, and it steps up to level 3), and then it steps horizontally to find the next free stage in the exchange, and so on, until you dial the last number. The last selector steps up to the number you dial, then steps horizontally to the last digit of the number you dial, and tries to connect you to the other end.
As you can imagine, a large telephone exchange is an incredibly noisy place because there are switches and relays constantly in motion. My colleague described working late one night in one of these exchanges. It was quiet, with just the odd call progressing (he said you could hear a single call stepping through the exchange - you could physically hear how far the dialing had progressed by where the sound of switch and relay motion was coming from). Then all of a sudden, the noise started to build up as more and more people were making calls, until the place was a deafening racket. Wondering what the hell was going on, he phoned headquarters and found out the reason - a soap opera had ended in some sort of controversy and everyone was gossiping about it.
These electromechanical machines seemed *alive*. If you look on youtube, there's quite a few videos of them in action (various designs from various countries). There used to be a working rack of Strowger gear at the London Science Museum, probably for lack of someone to maintain it it's unfortunately now just a static exhibit (or at least was, a couple of years ago). But when it was working it was fun to get all 8 phones connected to each other, then replace the handsets simulataneously. The sound of all the selectors returning home at once was sweet enough to make a brave man cry.
Also it's quite easy to see why the phone used to be so hideously expensive. It wasn't just because of the then GPO monopoly, but because it took 30 engineers to keep a busy 10,000 line Strowger exchange working. Today, it takes 1 engineer to keep six 10,000 line digital exchanges working.
Re:Comment follows (Score:5, Interesting)
The sound of a dial-up modem making a connection is as much a part of my childhood as hair metal...
We could discern by the negotiating tones what baud rate it was connecting on (300, 1200/75, 2400, 9600...), and, for later times, whether HST or similar kicked in.
And nothing sounded more awesome than a Trailblazer modem connecting with PEP at 6 bauds on up to 512 channels. That brumm had some of the same effect on the male nervous system as a straight 8 engine coming to life.
Other sounds I remember include
- cassette deck sounds
- a record after finishing, with the stylus stuck at the end.
- the slap-slap-slap of tapes when the reel finished
- the winding of a film camera
- the sound of a Dunhill lighter
- manual pencil sharpeners
- whistle of a tea kettle
- the bell of wind-up alarm clocks
- the sounds of non-computerized pinball machines
- hammond organs
- kids playing with cork pop guns
- "Houston, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed."
Re:Comment follows (Score:4, Interesting)
A short quick series of tones or squeals followed by white noise then silence meant you probably had a pretty good connection. Repeated tones or squeals and attempts to connect (the sound would change on each attempt, meaning the modem was stepping down its speed before retrying each time) usually meant you had noise on the line and you'd connect at slow speeds, if you could connect at all. (Better ask the phone company to test your lines, ma'am - be sure to tell them that you're trying to use your fax machine, not a modem, because they're obligated to provide a good connection for a fax machine. They regard modems as competition for their expensive ISDN, and they hate people that keep their modems connected to local numbers all the time on their lines for "free".)
Listening to the sounds (I sometimes had them hold the phone up to the tower) was much simpler than attempting to direct the often-clueless users to the modem diagnostics control panel and read off a series of cryptic messages.
And the joyous change in sound (ba-dung-ba-dung-chhhhhhhhh replacing squeals and static) when my wife and I splurged to buy a "super fast" 28.8 modem to replace our original 14.4 modem that came with our first PC in 1993...knowing we could now surf the web with Netscape twice as fast and download jpgs in 10 seconds instead of 20...good times, good times.