The Sound of the Internet: Dial-Up Days

The Sacred Sound

EEEE-KKKKKK-BONG-BONG-KSHHHHHHHHH...

You know it. You can hear it in your head right now. If you grew up in the 90s, that dial-up handshake is burned into your auditory memory forever.

My family got AOL in 1996. I was fifteen. I remember the exact moment my dad finished setting it up and clicked "Connect" for the first time. That modem started its alien song - screech, bong, static, more static - and then a voice from the computer said "Welcome!"

I didn't fully understand what had just happened. I don't think any of us did. We'd just connected our home to every other connected home on the planet. But at the time, it was just cool.

The Family Phone Line Wars

Here's something kids today will never understand: the internet and the phone shared the same line.

If someone picked up the phone while you were online, you got disconnected. Game over. Whatever you were doing, however long you'd been doing it - gone. And you had to start the whole connection process over again.

This led to warfare in my house.

"GET OFF THE INTERNET, I NEED TO CALL JENNY!" my sister would scream from upstairs. I'd scream back something about being in the middle of something important. (It was never actually important. It was probably Hampster Dance or a chat room.)

We eventually got a second phone line just for the internet. My parents presented this as a solution to the fighting. Really, it was admission that they too had become addicted to "You've Got Mail!"

My Screen Name Was xSoccerDude97x

I'm not proud of it. But there it is.

My buddy list on AIM was about forty people, most of them from school. The away messages were their own art form - Blink-182 lyrics if you were a certain type of kid, Eminem lyrics if you were another type, cryptic song quotes that everyone knew were about your crush if you were trying to be subtle.

I spent more hours on AIM than I spent doing homework. Probably more hours than I spent sleeping. You'd be talking to three people at once, each conversation in a different window, each one urgent and important in the way that only teenage conversations can be.

"brb, dinner"

"back"

"nm u?"

"nm"

Thousands of conversations that amounted to nothing. And also everything.

The Napster Era

When Napster hit, I thought I'd discovered the secret of the universe.

Free music. Any song I wanted. I just had to search for it, hope someone was sharing it, and then wait... and wait... and wait...

A single song could take forty-five minutes to download. You'd start it before dinner and check on it periodically, watching that progress bar inch forward. 12%... 23%... 47%... And then your sister would pick up the phone to call Jenny and your connection would die and you'd have to start over from scratch.

I once spent an entire weekend downloading a single album. Twelve songs. Each one an act of patience and faith.

The worst part was the fakes. You'd wait forty-five minutes for a song, finally get it, double-click to play it, and it would be some different song entirely. Or worse - silence. Or even worse than that - a voice saying "This is not the song you were looking for" followed by laughter.

My GeoCities Website

I had a website. Of course I had a website. It was hosted on GeoCities in the "Athens" neighborhood because that was the one for education and I thought that sounded smart.

It had: an under construction GIF (the little guy with the hard hat digging), a visitor counter (stuck at 47 for months because nobody visited except me checking if anybody visited), a guestbook that got one entry from my cousin, and a background pattern of soccer balls that tiled forever.

The centerpiece was a page of links to other websites I liked. Because that's what websites were for back then - pointing you to other websites. The whole internet was like a choose-your-own-adventure book, each page leading to new pages leading to new pages.

I spent hours getting the HTML just right. Font colors. Blinking text. A marquee that scrolled my name across the top of the page. I thought it was the most impressive thing anyone had ever created. It probably made visitors' eyes bleed.

What We Were Actually Doing

Looking back, most of my internet time was spent doing absolutely nothing productive. Talking to people I'd see at school the next day. Downloading songs I could have heard on the radio. Building websites nobody visited.

But it felt important. It felt like the future. Because it was.

Every time I complained about slow WiFi, every time I got frustrated when a page takes more than two seconds to load, I try to remember: there was a time when connecting to the internet was an event. When "You've Got Mail!" made your heart beat faster. When the whole worldwide web felt like a frontier, and each of us was an explorer.

My son has had internet access since before he could talk. He'll never know the sound of a modem. He'll never feel the anticipation of watching a progress bar or the devastation of a dropped connection.

That's probably fine. Progress is progress.

But sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet, I can still hear that sound.

EEEE-KKKKKK-BONG-BONG-KSHHHHHHHHH...

Welcome. You've got mail.