Getting Dial Up Internet in 2023!

In this video I added Dial Up Internet to my retro setup, and the results are amazing!

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[dirtyvinyl]

You dialed up in 2023 causing the world beneath your feet to shake, imagine the mainframes you just spun up with this action. Long Wire transmission towers broadcasting for the first time in decades, computers at NASA turning on, a random demodulator blinking and screaming in some dudes office at Comcast

[michaeldarna]

Actually understanding what the noises are is a gift I wasn't expecting today

[ericnail]

That dial up intro showing the two modems (literally) talking was the best I’ve ever seen. 5 stars.

[maximusthezoura]

not only did you manage to get dial up in 2023, but you caused an entire earthquake from the sheer might of your technical prowess

[AndreGreeff]

ok, just straight off the bat... major respect for synchronizing all the tones in the dial-up "sound" sample with their labels, that was cool! :)

[ratinthecat]

I once made a "dial-up" bridge on a Linux box to get my Dreamcast online. Just a phone cable between the console and an external modem, no switching or dial tone happening. Let the Dreamcast dial any random number, and then on the Linux side manually sent ATA to the modem to get the handshake stuff started.

[barrycohen]

Retired Telecom Engineer here. The traditional landlines we called POTS Lines. "Plain Old Telephone Service." Twisted copper pair- Two wires. With built in 90v DC electric which was primarily there for the ringer. If your power went out in the house, the telephone would still work, as the phone company provided that 90v of power.

[madyogi]

8:00 Someone at the other end just woke up in server room and yelled "No f**ng way"...

[DFXKX]

I love the fact that, as a kid, while I couldn't tell what exactly the tones where doing, I could actually tell if it was going to be a garbage connection or not. and being older and understanding what the tones are for, it makes a lot more sense.

[dontown-lbke]

I was an Alpha tester for the ARPANET (now called Internet) in 1969. They brought a Telex machine to our High school here in Vancouver, BC & hooked it up to an acoustic modem & a telephone handset & we sent an "E-mail" to SFU. I still get my Internet through a land-line phone on my desktop PC at home. Imagine the Internet is 54 ys old.

[JohnDL]

This is why AOL did so well. They took all this out of the users hand and did it all for you. Everything was fairly seamless for the average person. AOL was the internet for many people back then.

[chaoss]

Golden ages of the internet was in the late 90's and mid to late 00's. Today it's mostly subscriptions, ads and dead links - a shell of it's former self.

I remember downloading Quake mods from BluesNews and getting mp3's from Limewire

[GeForce]

The fact that dial up is still functional in the 2020s is honestly crazy

[Winter_]

My family had dial-up until 2009, as my father refused to pay for high speed until I hit high school. I have fond memories of trying desperately to play Club Penguin with my friends over a dial-up connection. Good times, lol

[lukisprieston]

Nowadays we see dial-up as primitive and outmoded, but the engineering that made it work in the 90s was insane.

You see, phone networks were designed to transmit the human voice to human ears. The higher end of frequencies humans can hear is around 20 kHz, or 20, 000 vibrations per second. But transmitting that much data is complicated, and most people’s voices don’t sound like a steam whistle, so you can cut way, way back on the frequency range without much loss of fidelity.

Then, in the 90s when the internet took off and suddenly everyone wanted to send and receive megabytes of data, engineers found a way to transmit *56, 000* vibrations (bits) a second reliably on these decades-old lines that were never designed for it. That deserves a lot of credit.

[trssho]

I am a computer engineer and I love the fact you break down what the sounds mean when dialing/connecting. You dont see that often. I used to listen to the handshake and would just hang up and reconnect if it "didnt sound right" so I knew it was a stable and fast connection. Side note, I used to use BBS all the time, in fact I still have all my old Commodore gear including my modems. I used my Commodore 64 the most with a 300 baud modem, but I also have a 1200 baud modem for the C64. I didnt use it long before moving to a 286 with a 2400 baud ISA modem, but I remember when I upgraded from 300 to 1200 and I remember it being amazing. :) I think my next modem was 14.4, then 33.6 and due to the pretty poor phone service and line quality in my area I stayed on 33.6 for a LONG time since it seemed more stable than my v92 (which I still have as well). I also remember first time I was gaming "online" with NASCAR Racing (I think it was on DOS).... with a friend who lived a few doors down. We would open the game on one system and it would be listening on its modem, then I would RUN home as fast as I could to dial his house so the two computers would connect and we would race 'online'. It was completely impractical, but we were amazed we could do it at all. Great video, brings back a lot of memories....

[jeremywj]

The nice thing about dial up was you had to connect to the internet each time you wanted on. Hearing those sounds meant you were about to enter a whole new world and the options of what to do seemed unlimited. It was a exciting. Broadband is great, but it has kind of destroyed the fun of the actual act of getting on the internet.

[burnzy]

This was my world growing up, windows used to be so much fun and not being connected to the internet 24/7 was a totally different world. Great video, hope it does some numbers :)

[Sumbuddysumwhere]

That Net Zero is even working at all absolutely blew my mind.

[QuantumBraced]

My mother and I are still not on great terms because of how much we fought over the phone line when I was a teen. It got ugly for real, I had a system where I would disconnect as soon as I heard her going for the phone, she would get absolutely livid if she discovered that I'd been online and her girlfriends couldn't call her. We almost got into physical fights a few times, and we're still both bitter about it 20 years later. It's kind of incredible how the state of technology at a point in time could literally split up a family. If she'd had me a few years later, we would have had DSL and there would have been no issue at all.