The end of dial-up internet means future generations will no longer hear the iconic screech of the dial-up handshake. However, YouTube creator Nick Bild did not want this experience to be lost to history, so he used a Raspberry Pi 3 and a USB Wi-Fi adapter to gather network traffic and convert it into an analog signal that is blasted out of a small speaker. According to Bild’s Hackaday project, he had to add random amplitude and frequency adjustments to make the output sound more interesting, but all the data is sourced from the Wi-Fi network.
Back before the days of DSL and fiber-optic internet, all our data had to travel over phone lines. Since these weren’t designed for digital signals, internet companies had to use modems to convert them into analog signals (i.e., sound) that could be transmitted over the already existing telephone network. The nostalgic screeching sound many born in the ‘90s and earlier hear when connecting to the internet is just the handshake signal between two computers negotiating which protocol they’ll use to communicate. Once the connection has been established, the screeching just turns to static, which is what actual data sounds like.
