
SriPhi54 Says: We keep a 1970's rotary phone in the closet for electrical outages.The Office of the University Registrar (OUR) keeps the official university records of enrollment and academic standing.
UH OH ICQ REGISTER PC
The musical shutdown sound let you know that, even if you were across the room, your PC was successfully turning off, rather than getting stuck.
UH OH ICQ REGISTER WINDOWS
Starting with Windows 95, users had to actually hit a shutdown button and wait anywhere from seconds to more than a minute for the computer to shut off. With earlier versions of Windows and DOS, you’d simply exit your program to a command prompt, hit the power button and watch as your computer turned off immediately. Before Windows 95 launched, PC users always knew exactly when their computers were powered down. Still, it was always wonderful to pick up your phone and hear the comforting dial tone that let you know that, yes, you still had service, even when the power in your house was out. Today, some VoIP phones still give you a dial tone as a way of emulating that past, but in reality, the need for this noise disappeared the minute people started using digital methods of communication. If you didn’t act quickly and dial, the phone would get angry at you and start making louder beeps to get your attention. Back in the old days of copper phone wire and real live phone operators, you’d hear a dial tone every time you picked up the phone, just to let you know that you had an active connection. But back in the days of CompuServe and Prodigy, we had to enter a local number into our computer’s dialer and then listen as our 2,400 baud modem dialed the phone, the phone rang, and then the two modems made a long dance of beeps and boings that sounded more like Ricochet Rabbit getting into a gunfight or Fred Flintstone foot-driving his car than two finely tuned computers connecting. In the age of 4G and fiber optics, it’s hard to remember a time when we had to use copper phone lines to dial up to our Internet services. The most satisfying part of the rewind sound was how the whirring noises seemed to get louder as the gears sped up in their race back to the beginning of the tape.
/i/1260781549.png)

So before we could grab that nearly overdue copy of “Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama,” jump in the car, and run three red lights to get to Blockbuster in time to avoid a late fee, we had to sit through five minutes of tape whirring as we waited for the VCR to bring our tape back to the beginning. Long before the age of Netflix, we rented tapes from the video store and lived in constant fear that, if we forgot to be kind and rewind them, we’d get charged a penalty. But for those of us who lived through the beginning of the PC revolution, these 13 tech sounds will always be hardcoded into our memories.

A child born today has a greater chance of hearing a real cloned dinosaur roar than a busy signal. Not long ago, the sounds our devices made reminded us that they were doing something truly important, whether that task was connecting us to the Internet or bringing us back to the beginning of our favorite VHS movies.

As we move toward an age of quiet gadgets that do everything possible not to get in our way, we’re losing our appreciation for all the magic under the hood.
