That iconic sing-song modem handshake tone will soon be heard no more after Telstra announced plans to switch off its dial-up service.
Citing a tiny user-base in the hundreds, Australia's biggest telco will follow the lead of other providers and switch off the exchanges in December.
Dial up left its mark on our culture, though.
Obviously, there was the iconic handshake tone. Dial up internet repurposed telephone lines, so data was actually transmitted using audio signals that the modem would translate into bytes.
That tone, which goes something like beep beep beep bepitty boooop ba dung ba baaaaa psssssst, allows the modem to talk to the exchange modem and set up a connection.
Once the modem's connection had been secured the modem would mute its speaker – so it was still receiving audio signals, just not playing them out loud.
Have a listen to the dial up tone, recorded by John Pemberton, while watching a spectrogram of the sound - it neatly demonstrates the different messages that are sent between modem and exchange as the initial connection is established.
The other key feature of dial up was its phone exclusivity - you had to unplug the home phone to use it, at least until ISDN arrived. ISDN came with a dedicated data phone line and was the precursor to broadband.
And then there was the speed. It'd take you roughly 20 hours to download the latest episode of Game of Thrones if your 56k dial-up modem was running at full throttle – which, usually, it did not. The devices averaged more like 40-50 kbs.
Opening the front page of Wikipedia would take about 30 seconds, according to one test.
Slow speeds never stopped people, though – in fact, the original Halo came with the ability to be played online using a dial-up connection. It wasn't until the release of the first Xbox, which was broadband only, that dial-up stopped being supported.
A vanishingly small number of people still use dial-up in Australia, but they are out there.
The latest ABS census, in 2011, found Reservoir (454) and Frankston (429) had the highest number of remaining connections, although experts say that number is probably even smaller now.
RMIT internet expert Dr Mark Gregory says the service, and its evolved cousin ISDN, remained useful for people who were too far away from telephone exchanges to get broadband.
"There are still people on the periphery of cities and towns that use ISDN. Because it's not operating on the voice band, it's using all the bandwidth on the copper and it's digital, you can use repeaters. If someone's a long way away from a telephone exchange ... they can still get ISDN."
Telstra's switch-off won't mean the end, altogether, of dial-up. There are still a few companies offering the service – including, most intriguingly, Dodo.
Dodo offers a dial-up service with unlimited data for $1 a month. Surely someone can think of a use for that – even if it is downloading Game of Thrones really slowly.
