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The Sounds of Tech Past
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."
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!).
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). 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.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Really? How fucking annoying...
A nice sonic blast just to make sure you'll need hearing aids sooner rather than later.
Oh wait, those are still around...
A few weeks ago, I asked my 5 year old daughter who knows how to use my iphone, etc. if she knows what a calculator is, surprisingly she said no. Even when I showed her one.
Here: http://www.itworld.com/print/260490
K Man
I still remember the exact series of sounds the floppy drive in my first computer made while it was booting DR-DOS 6.0.
If you miss the sounds of floppy drives, then perhaps floppy drive music is the thing for you.
See, for instance www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOA9PGYeP3E
SJW n. One who posts facts.
9. The mimeograph mix:
Wow, the things that count as music nowadays...
(click the music button). An entire library of computer-generated music, remembered fondly by the ~30 million who owned one of these machines. As soon as I hear these songs it takes me back to my middle and high school years.
http://www.lemon64.com/
http://www.lemonamiga.com/
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
They should have used the Apple Disc II. I always loved the sound of that drive. Kind of a soft swishing, not the angry gronk noise of most 5.25" drives.
I also fondly remember the sound of an Atari 800 booting from floppy. Especially if you had the US Doubler modification... the sound of speed.
Looks like they're all videos. I was hoping there'd be a nice blast from the past in audio form only...it'd be just my style to change my phone's ringtone to the old modem negotiation, especially for the annoying callers...
End the FUD
Just shut the fuck up. No one here cares about your crapware. Go dive into a vat of acid already.
I loved the BBC Micro formatting its disk- there was a faint ding every time the head moved from one track to the next. As it got further along the tone gradually got higher and higher.
And what about a 1/4 inch tape, that definitely had a distinctive sound.
All those sounds, and no mention of loading programs from cassette tape. Nothing like actually being able to HEAR the software as it loads in to your TI-99/4A.
The author (and commentators) have it wrong. These are not mimeographs we remember sniffing. (Perhaps we sniffed too many?)
Mimeographs used a stencil-type master and squeezed ink, usually black, onto the target paper. The mimeo master had to be typewritten; only a typewriter's forcefulness could penetrate the template, forming the stencil. An electric typewriter was generally required for a consistent result. (But set the impact force too high, and you'd end up with punched-out o's, p's, b's, a's, etc.)
Dittos used a carbon-based master and imprinted (usually purple) image onto the target paper via a methanol-based solvent of distinctive aroma. There was no ink. Ditto masters could be typewritten or drawn-on by a ballpoint pen.
Dittos possessed the "sweet scent" the author mentions. (I doubt that scent was particularly healthy, methanol being toxic.) The scent would fade with time. If the copy was particularly fresh, the paper would be ever so slightly damp and cool from the solvent.
So: Dittos, not mimeographs. Dittos. Nobody ever enjoyed sniffing a mimeographed copy. They were pretty hard on the eyes, too.
Dittos were great for classroom use, which is why so many of us over the age of forty remember them and their smell. They could make a few dozen copies per master, were cheap and didn't require a typewriter. Their ability to form an image faded with the number of copies. The masters also aged in their box and grew pale.
By comparison, mimeos could render many hundreds of pages per master, and the master could be re-used. So dittos were for each teacher's quizzes and study sheets and homework assignments, whereas the arrival of a mimeographed page heralded a missive from Administration to the whole school.
Ditto machines were usually hand-cranked. Mimeos were usually electrically-powered.
Teachers and office staff often enlisted student help in making dittos--a key perk of being a recognized member of the AV squad--but the hulking mimeo machine was dangerous and off-limits to kids. But oh, what an allure that humming, complicated, mysterious monstrosity cast upon us proto-geeks... I well recall the day I was shown how it's used by a kindly admin secretary. The master was held in place on the drum with hooks! Versus a clamp on the ditto machine. Hook, smooth, check ink level, load paper, press a button. Whir, whir, ca-chunk, whir, ca-chunk, whir, ca-chunk.... Then, with the twist of a knob, it would pick up speed. whircachunkwhircachunkwhircachunk... The mind reeled.
Many differences.
Get it straight.
Another tech sound lost to the past is the sound of people retching upon seeing their first goatse :( Now it's just passee, a tired cliche of the shocksite genre.
ASR-33 Teletype
any unit record (IBM card) equipment - now, they had rhythm!
Line printer - chain was better than drum for rhythmic sound
The lovely chirping of the Seagate ST-225: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZNlLvcxVrBE#t=88s
http://www.itworld.com/print/260490
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.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet (I, v, 166-167)
The v.92 handshake still sounds rather recent to me, especially considering I just bought one to send to my mother so she could use AOL (I'm not kidding - she wanted AOL because she's used to it - I didn't know they were still around!).
I'd have rather heard a Bell 212A carrier. Older, and much less silly sounding than these newfangled 56k modems.
:wq
They're missing one important entry: hard drive clatter. Sure, you can still hear it if you get close to the tower, or have a particular brand of drives (eg. Hitachi) which aren't as aggressively acoustically tuned.
Surely I'm not the only one who remembers being able to hear their drive(s) from the other side of the room as the machine boots up? Today's workstations positively whisper, in comparison - to the point where many people don't realize that's a device inside doing something, but just 'phantom noises'. With SSDs becoming more common, it won't be long until hard drives are relegated to the server rooms and geek dwellings.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Ok, show of hands, how many people here could diagnose modem connection problems and handshake speeds by listening?
Lets see if I can do this justice.
Beee beeee beeeeeeee boo waaa woooo waaaaaaaaa bzzzzzzzzup thup thup thup thup thup thup thup PING! PING fwashhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Ok, name that connection speed!
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).
Some of the music I listen to samples (or recreates) "old" (some not really that old) sounds.
Eisenfunk - Pong
X-Dream - We Interface
Noisuf-X - Please Hang Up
The in-band long-distance telephone routing signal.
Bruce Perens.
With the scammed sounds.
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Or the chain drive chorus, where the old IBM chain drive printers ripped off lines of printing in rapid succession? Print a line of the same characters for a delightful wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp or the sequence of letters on the chain for a satisfying BANG!
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Heck, the teachers used to draft us (students) to run the machines for them - never for a test targeted at the draftees, of course. I even had to prepare a master copy once.
I wanted a distinctive, non-banal, and non-repetitive ringtone, so I installed the complete modem dial-up sequence, from pulse tones to final handshake. It's long enough that I never hear it repeat before answering.
And for some reason my wife thinks I'm a nerd (but she knew that when she married a grad physics student).
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
It's hell to get old, isn't it?
Rumor has it that the alternative is worse.
In the '60s NCR had a product called CRAM which stood for Card Random Access Memory. It was a deck of magnetized cards that were towed around a spinning drum. When they crashed, which was often, they shook the office!!
On head crashes in general; I once got an emergency call from a bank customer who needed an emergency replacement of their master software pack (MSP) because of head crashes. When I got to the site the FEs were replacing 3 drives. I asked the operator what happened and he said that the MSP had crashed on drive 1 so he tried it on the other drives. When that didn't work he pulled out the backup MSP and repeated the process! IT support hasn't changed much in forty years, has it?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet (I, v, 166-167)
If we had smell-o-vision then the smell I would want is the smell of a data center full of lineprinters. You knew when you were in that kind of facility the moment you walked in. Ah, the 1980's and Real Computers... *sigh*
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Very distinctive vvvvvvvvweep sound as your new album is ruined.
I present to you..
And I say: ..go.. ..fuck.. ..yourself...
Crikey! When I started at Data General in the repair depot, all of our test chassis used the good, old 110 baud teletype *with* built-in paper tape reader. Ah, those were the days....
My first modem had the sound playback as an option. That was the first option I found and disabled. Why listen to that awful screech?
The surprising thing to me is how many anachronistic sound effects I still hear -- in movies, TV, radio programs, etc. They're useful in emphasizing certain actions, so they keep getting used, even when not dealing with a historical period-piece.
Loading programs from tape on e.g. the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Five minutes of aural assault (followed by swearing as the load failed at 4:55).
Apple Disk ][ drive booting, seeking the head back to track 0, bumping up against the stop repeatedly. Favorite computer sound ever.
Has anyone else been inside an electromechanical telephone exchange? It was a real ear and eye opener the first time.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well I STILL have a computer with a 5.25" floppy drive in it. I had to find an old mother board that still had a floppy interface (it only supports ONE drive) so I can't use both 3.5 and 5.25 drives at once. I dug up an old "AT" "HD" drive for the purpose of transfering my old copies of "Zork", "leather goddess of Phobos", and "hitchhikers guide" games to my Linux box to enjoy all over again.
I also still have a Kodak Carrosel Projector and a shitload of slides. My screen got pitched though, it was MOLDY (yuck!). I need to buy a slide scanner and convert all my negatives and slides to digital. Does anybody make a medium format slide scanner (might be able to do it on my flat bed)?
Ah phone booths. A friend of mine recorded the sound of quarters, nickles and dimes falling though a pay phone on a cassette recorder and then would play it back though the phone to rip the phone company off on long distance calls. Don't laugh, it always worked!
As for static, doesn't anybody but me still listen to shortwave radio anymore? I still have this real nice Zenith Transoceanic portable.
Here's a once widely used machine few have seen or heard. This is a Teletype Model 14 printer designed in 1924 and built in 1929. This was the technology used for telegrams from 1925 to 1959. Every Western Union office had a few of these. After cleaning, oiling, a new case, and some minor repairs, this 80-year old machine works reliably. We usually have it connected to a news RSS feed, or get messages via SMS through an SMS gateway.
We'll have this, and some of our other gear, at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention.
Three or four months ago, my wife told my 16-year old stepson to call and see if the person that cuts his hair was working that day. There was a big to-do that day about him not wanting to do anything for himself, and one of the results of that was the need for him to make this call rather than relying on his mom. Anyway, after some typical teenage bitching he went off to his room to call the place with his cell phone. A few minutes pass and comes out again.
Him: "The phone isn't working."
Us: "It's not working. Really. Did you dial the right number?"
Him: "Yeah! Of course I did! I'm not that stupid. It's just making some weird noise."
Us: "What number did you dial?"
Him: [He told us.]
I got my cell and called that number. [beeeeep] [pause] [beeeeep] [pause] [beeeeep]
Us: "That, son, is a busy signal."
Him: "A what?"
While I can get nostalgic about the picture of a CRT, I don't miss the constant high-pitched sound it made while on. I could hear it even when I was a few rooms away. It gave me headaches. When LCD displays became affordable, I got one and at the same time rid myself of my TV in favor of watching through a capture card.
Twinstiq, game news
game maker are faget software.
haha faget learn real language instead of faget crappy dragon-drop game creation faget application.
real (not faget) man write game in assemble.
faget.
One of the few old technologies that's likely to stay with us forever.
Twenty billion years isn't forever.
Every end has half a stick.
start:
"Thank you for calling (cable or phone company).
(pause) Your call is important to us.
(pause) All of our service representatives are currently busy.
Please stay on the line, and your call will be answered in the order it was received."
(65 seconds of pop music)
goto start;
The computer voice of a generation!
http://www.theuser.org/dotmatrix/en/intro.html
Dot Matrix is far from dead.
The Cash Register Chorus (Money), Clockwork chatter(Time), Radio Tuner's Tune(Wish You Were Here), Busy Signal Ballad, Operator Ode and Long Distance Lyra(Young Lust) are saved for the ages.
... connected to a mainframe (KDF9, later a DECSystem10). One user with a compute-intensive job could bring the room to a total standstill, then gradually the terminals would come back to life as the workload eased.
This is the demo that blew me away back in '93:
Future Crew (Second Reality)
Not only is the graphics and sound amazing for its' time, but these guys wrote their own memory manager and audio/video drivers for this demo. Slashdot even voted it one of the top 10 hacks of all time.
As RC says, the purple stuff that you got high on was the ditto machine. It was cheaper and easier than a real mimeograph, and good enough for elementary school. Mimeographs used real ink, usually black.
A few years back, a friend of mine wanted to put out a newspaper at Burning Man. It's a fairly hostile environment for computer equipment - playa dust does nasty things to laser printers. She looked around on eBay and was able to find a genuine Gestetner Mimeograph machine, and she used a manual typewriter to cut stencils.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I find this funny since the company I work for still uses dial-up modem's for some locations and dot matrix printers for route tickets.
That being said we are 8 months away from no more modems - but the dot matrix will stay for quite awhile
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
dont need quality? need impact for carbon copy paperwork? need to print crap on a preprinted form with no word file to align against? need to print 1000 pages a day on a 5$ ribbon? ... and its funny an OKI Data in its highest speed can barf out a page of text for far less money and a little less time than a modern laser
You aint going to get that with laser
sometimes we forget, not everything is a life altering presentation ... sometimes we just need shit on paper in mass.
The hammond organ can still be heard. Here is a sample from 2002 with the maestro himself, Jon Lord, but Purple continues, now with Don Airey on keyboards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMfAu72qma0
I used to have a real teletype behind me at work, to do queries. The thing would chug into life every now and then with the answer to some command entered into a computer. One would type in a card line (rather like command options in the cobol style), and it would send back a string of lines.
The joys of the card punch and the tape punch. These chug away, likewise mounted so that their vibrations would not do some damage.
The sound of bells relaying messages, when BEL actually rang a bell. Of course there (was) the telephone system i saw my brother use, to ring up control at roma, consists of a party-line system, where one rings long-long-long etc.
Here (australia), it was the custom to play the national anthem (god save the queen), at the end of every show (cinema, live, television close). In the seventies, they changed it to some other thing (advance australia fair). One day not too long ago, i was listening to a disk of national anthems, and found that i was standing when GSTQ was played. So ingrained. (They used GSTQ to get the beatles out of an adelaide theatre: the beatles made their exit as the audience stood at attention to higher things).
Real money. not a sound, but the cash registers and so forth were generally mechanical things where one might press the money in and pull a lever. Australia abandoned currency on 14 feb 1966, when we got these decimal beads in.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
- cassette deck sounds -- I don't remember how one of sounded. Except for, maybe, the sound the door made when you closed it.
- a record after finishing, with the stylus stuck at the end. -- Even more missed is the records that recorded some repetitive music or sounds right into the end so that leaving the stylus on the record provided you endless hours of entertainment.
- the slap-slap-slap of tapes when the reel finished -- Still have one of those (an old Teac) but I haven't had it connected to the stereo for years.
- the winding of a film camera -- Still have one of those, too. Haven't used it for a couple of years.
- the sound of a Dunhill lighter -- Does the sound of a Zippo lighter cover flipping open and closed count?
- manual pencil sharpeners -- I recall that, not too long ago, when I was at the office supply store you could still buy those.
- whistle of a tea kettle -- The only civilized way to heat water for tea is to use a whistling kettle. (We have two.)
- the bell of wind-up alarm clocks -- Still use one of those when I'm traveling. (Missed one too many wake-up calls from the hotel.)
- the sounds of non-computerized pinball machines -- I have friends that collect those. Much prefer the sound of real bells over the synthesized noise that more recent machines produce.
- hammond organs -- Ah... there's nothing like the sound of a B3 playing through Leslie speaker cabinets.
- kids playing with cork pop guns -- I remember having one of those when I was really young. I can't recall what they sounded like, though. Now the sound of my air rifle is a fond memory. (Probably have the cops descending on you if your kids played with one of those nowadays.)
- "Houston, Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed." -- Heard that "live" in my uncle's living room. A few years ago I stood behind some teenagers at a museum where the training LEM was on display and listened to them going back and forth not knowing what "that thing" was. Sad.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Mistabishi - Printer Jam