Back in the days of dial-up, your computer performed a symphony just to get online. Here’s what every bleep, screech, and ding actually did.

Though your old dial-up modem (hopefully) now sits in a junk yard somewhere, its beeps and whistles surely remain etched into your brain. With this massive image, Oona Räisänen decided to ...

This is the sound of the dial-up modem: Back in the 1990s a dial-up modem was how you accessed the internet. A very early version is pictured above. You’d plug it into your desktop computer and ...

For anyone who lived through the dial-up era, those screeches and beeps are unforgettable — but each sound actually meant ...

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic remembers the sound of a dial-up modem so fondly that he has scoured the internet to find out exactly what all those grating tones meant.

The sound of waiting for your dial-up modem to connect probably induces enough nightmarish flashbacks as it is. But when you slow that same smattering of scratches and clangs down 700%, you get ...

Many of today's internet users remember browsing the web for the first time via AOL dial-up. But as subscribers dwindle, the ...

America Online was famous for its free trial discs, which seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s when the internet was gaining ...

Back in the days of dial-up, your computer performed a symphony just to get online. Here’s what every bleep, screech, and ding actually did.

But to me, all of those sounds -- as symbols of the era in which I've come up -- remain secondary to the hissing and crackling of the modem handshake. I first heard that sound as a nine-year-old.