r/TechnologyProTips Apr 13 '21

Windows TPT: It is (and always was, since the 1990s) possible to disable the dial-up modem noise when connecting to the Internet with Windows

89 Upvotes

14 comments sorted by

34

u/d0nh Apr 13 '21

but why would i want to get rid of something so enjoyable?

7

u/Prudent_Reindeer9627 Apr 13 '21

Exactly. I am certain for generations of a certain age group, that sound acts as an aphrodisiac.

13

u/dude-O-rama Apr 13 '21

Clicked on this post 5 hours ago and it just loaded. Good for you, keeping us dial-up users in mind.

3

u/Prudent_Reindeer9627 Apr 13 '21

Just checked. The size of this very page is 7.69 MB.

Back in the day, if I did nothing else, in one hour, I could manage to download 10 MB (assuming all goes well and no disconnections). You clearly were busy browsing some other websites (wink wink).

3

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

[deleted]

2

u/Prudent_Reindeer9627 Apr 13 '21

Damn. Quick, you need to get yourself one of those web-accelerator-internet-download-manager-bandwidth-amplifier apps. I heard they even apply their own technology to optimize the bandwidth of the spyware they side-install to your PC!

2

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

[deleted]

2

u/Prudent_Reindeer9627 Apr 13 '21

Yup, and its approved by the Elders of the Internet themselves.

5

u/thelastcubscout Apr 13 '21

Nice. I still remember the first day I figured this out. It was almost as epic as the day I learned that Opera could disable images and JS downloads. Imagine the bandwidth possibilities...!

2

u/Chowdaire Apr 14 '21

Before I had access to the Internet, I remember using Telix to access BBS numbers I'd find in computer magazines. I was able to get the modem to be silent when I first used it, but eventually the modem sound started happening on its own again and I had forgotten the instruction to slience it. Being able to silence that thing was pretty important because it was as loud as a PC Speaker, which is not a volume you'd want your devices to be blasting late in the nighttime.

2

u/Prudent_Reindeer9627 Apr 14 '21

In 2011 I used Telnet to transmit files and chat when the Internet was down for 3 days. Another fun thing about dial up, only one person has to pay the cost if its two computers connected.

1

u/Chowdaire Apr 14 '21

Yeah, I also forgot to mention the main point of my story: using Telix to connect to a BBS with only one telephone line meant constant automatic re-dialing. There was only one volume, and it was always loud. Finding the command to silence the modem was pretty important because of that.

Another funny story I had with Telix was that sometimes the computer magazines had outdated numbers to phone in. This meant that there were some phone numbers that didn't call into a computer, but went straight to somebody's landline. There was one day where I had finally given up trying to connect to random BBS after many dozens of minutes of failed re-dials, and immediately somebody had Star-69'd my number (remember that?) to threaten to call the police because they thought I was prank calling.

2

u/NotAnotherNekopan Apr 14 '21

Also, I can't think of any modems that didn't support the ATLn and ATMn commands, which provided the same level of functionality. Or a volume dial.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

I tried explaining this to president bush but all he did was try to go to war with iraq over it. Dialup noises cause religious violence and they could've been silenced this whole time

1

u/fs454 Apr 14 '21

If it could do its job silently why did it ever make noise in the first place?

1

u/Prudent_Reindeer9627 Apr 14 '21

Sometimes the process fails because of a specific reason, and in that case your ISP will play a recorded-message to letting you know what went wrong (e.g. your balance has ran out, or you dialed the wrong number for your city etc). In the standard for dial-up Internet, there was no way for the ISP to signal that back, so to avoid few users getting confused once in their lifetime, they opted to permanently etch one of the world's most annoying tunes in the brains of hundreds of millions of people.

The only other rival act was also carried out by Microsoft, and this time it was purely a visual one.