Things you can try for yourself
Museum.exe
Eight instruments and five machines that still start. Every one of them measures something that is true this minute, and every one of them moves when you press it.
These are the things I built to show something a paragraph cannot. Pick something, press something, and watch what the number does. Everything in here measures something that is true this minute, and there will be more.
Dial-up log-on
It took half a minute, and you heard every second of it
Connecting was not a state the machine was in. It was something that happened, out loud, while you sat and waited for it. Twenty-eight seconds, and this one got through on the first try.
Elapsed0:00/0:29
- 0:00Off the hookThe modem picks up the receiver on the house's one telephone line. A click in the relay, then nothing. From here on it is engaged for everybody else, and everybody in the house knew what that meant.
- 0:01Dial toneThe same sound you got when you lifted the receiver yourself. The exchange is saying the line is yours and that it is waiting for digits. The machine does exactly what you would have done, in the same order.
- 0:02The number goes outEvery digit is two tones laid on top of each other. This is a telephone number and not an address: at the other end a machine stands in a room, and somebody is paying for it. Ring the same number every evening and you knew it by ear.
- 0:04SilenceThe digits are out and nothing comes back. This is where it can turn out to be engaged, and then you hang up and try again in a quarter of an hour. These seconds are the whole reason people remember the sound.
- 0:06Something answersSound from the other end, and that is the message you were waiting for: it is not engaged, and there is something there that is switched on. The short tones are the two of them trying each other to work out what kind of machine the other one is.
- 0:10The answer toneOne pure tone at 2100 hertz, held for a good two seconds. This is the one people mean when they say modem noise. It is not talking to the other machine at all: it asks the telephone network to switch off its echo suppression, which is there for conversations and in the way of data.
- 0:13They measure the lineA short comb of tones up through the whole band. A telephone line is built for a voice and carries only 300 to 3400 hertz, and it is bad in its own way from one house to the next. Now they measure how much each frequency loses on the way.
- 0:15They tune themselves inNow it is only rasp, and the rasp is the point: they send each other patterns both of them know in advance, and tune themselves by what actually arrived. The speed is settled here, and it holds for this call only. Notice that it gets louder and louder right to the end.
- 0:26The speaker is cutThe level drops from the loudest point in the whole call to nothing in one second. It did not go quiet at the other end: the modem switches off its own speaker the moment the carrier locks, because it has nothing more to tell you. The silence is the receipt. You are in.
CONNECT
The whole call, from a public domain recording. The dial tone in it is American, 352 and 440 hertz; a Norwegian one is 425. The board on this site dials the real number over a Norwegian dial tone, and that sound belongs to this site.
It took the telephone
One line into the house meant one thing at a time. While I was on the board nobody could ring in, and anybody who picked up the receiver in the hallway put the whole call on the floor.
It cost by the minute
Every started unit was money, and it was the parents who got the bill. After five in the afternoon and at weekends it was half price, which is why so much of this happened at night.
It was often busy
One line, one caller. You got the busy signal, you waited, and you dialled again. On a good board that could go on for an hour, and nobody thought it was a fault.
Then it went quiet
ISDN does not sing. It is signalling and not sound: a click, two tones, and you were on. Faster in every way, and the one thing everybody who was there still remembers was gone.
Reading
Who was faster, you or the modem?
Two halves. First it times you reading a paragraph, and then it types the same paragraph in at the speed a line of the day would have delivered it. Nothing leaves your browser; the clock runs here.
1 How fast do you read?
A modem turned numbers into sound and sent them through a telephone network built for voices. The network passed the frequencies between 300 and 3400 hertz, and everything that was going over the line had to fit in there. That is why a modem sounded the way it did. It is not a machine beeping. It is data pretending to be a conversation. Every character went across as ten bits rather than eight. Eight of them were the content, one said that a character had begun, and one said that it had ended. The two machines shared no clock, so each character had to carry its own beginning and its own end. That is the arithmetic underneath every number on this page.
0,0 s
You read 240 words a minute, which is 22 characters a second.
2 How it came down the line
0,0 s
Time yourself above, and this will tell you which of the lines were faster than you.
Size and time
How big a thing was, and what that cost you
Pick a thing. Eight of them, seven lines, and the scale underneath is logarithmic, because nothing else could hold both ends of it.
158 kB · measured on this server
Every line before the cable modem was a telephone call, and a telephone call is the same width both ways. From 2000 they part, and that is half the reason nobody published video.
The diskette, measured against this page
The stylesheets, the scripts, the faces and the picture of the day are 1.4 MB more than a diskette holds. The page does not fit on one, before a single word is counted.
The wait
Wait for the picture
The case above says a picture took eleven minutes. This one is the picture at the top of the front page, arriving at the byte rate of a line you choose, from the top down, the way they did. Stop it whenever you like. Giving up was half of what it felt like.
This takes 26.2 s 0:00 0 B / 158 kB
The picture is the real file this server sends, at its real size. On the 56k line it is 26.2 s, and that was the fast one.
Colours
The colours you had
The same picture, in the palette of a screen somebody actually paid for. The grid holds still at 320 × 200 the whole way, so the only thing that moves is the colour: four, sixteen and 256 all existed at exactly that size, on CGA, EGA and VGA. The speckling is not a fault. It is dithering, and it is how a machine with four colours pretended to have more. The picture is opened up first, the same amount for all five, because that is what anybody did who had a screen like this and a photograph they wanted on it.
The palette itself, all 2 of them
8 kB · 320 × 200 · 2 colours · 1 bits per pixel
That is exactly what the card had to hold, and 26.7 s to send one screenful down a 2400 baud line. Nobody sent pictures.
The screen
Your screen, and the ones before it
Four screens people paid real money for, drawn to scale inside the one you are looking at. The frames are the whole screen, not a window in it.
Your screen holds 7 times as many pixels as the VGA screen everything was designed for.
The sound
The sound you got
The same piece, fifteen seconds, on six machines. Press another one while it plays and the bar you were in carries straight on. The timbre is not what this case is about: where the sound lived is.
The module, as it plays
The four recordings are served as MP3 copies, and the figures above them are what the originals weighed. The MIDI file and the tracker module are the real files, played here and now. All six are matched for loudness, so what you hear is the machine and not the volume knob.
Storage
What did it hold?
Pick something to put things on, then put things on it. The count is the easy half. The hard half is underneath it: on a stack of diskettes the machine was not waiting for itself, it was waiting for you to get up and change the disk.
You need0 3½" diskette, 1.44 MB
At the top
- Writing
- –
- Changing
- –
- All in
- –
- Reading
- –
- Cost
- –
Empty. Put something on it.
Capacities are what the format held. Rates are an ESTIMATE for the generation named beside them, sustained and sequential, with no seek and no filesystem in the way, so a real machine was slower than this and never faster. Changing a disk is counted at fifteen seconds. Two of the things are measured on this server and the rest are stated figures that move with every update.
The meter
The Internet taximeter
This one started the moment the page loaded, and it has not stopped. Everything above is about what a line could carry. This is the other half: what it cost to leave it open while you read.
- On the line
- 0:00
- Units clicked
- 1
One unit on connecting, then one every 60 s, at 0.31 kr
There is one of these running in the readout at the foot of every page on this site, and it does not start again when you turn a page. Press it and it shows you the bill.
The tariff is the one the 1998 mode on this site bills its own calls with, so there is one figure here and not two. It is an ESTIMATE of a local call on a Norwegian line in the late nineties. The subscription, the provider’s own hourly charge and the telephone itself are not in it. The conversion to today uses the consumer price index and is approximate.
The machines
Everything here still starts
Five machines, and not one of them is a film of a machine. They run in your browser, on this page, and every one of them takes the whole screen while it is up.
- 1992
The Eagle BBS
The board I ran from my bedroom, with one modem and one line. It dials, it connects, it asks who you are, and then you are standing in the menu with conferences, files, mail and a door. Eighty by twenty five characters in the real VGA font.
- 1994
Fatterns 486
It was my old man's, and I requisitioned it more or less on arrival. A clock-doubled 486 at sixty-six megahertz, MS-DOS 5.0, a prompt, and an evening spent trying to get a game to run on it. It answers DIR, COPY, MEM, CHKDSK, FDISK and a diagnostic that draws the interrupt map; CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT are read rather than printed, the setup screen is operative down to the boot order, and six hundred and forty kilobytes will not stretch however you shout at them. The lid comes off, and the board under it is drawn part by part: you can move a jumper, pull a memory module, take a card out of its slot to read what it is set to, and turn a lead round on the front panel header. The manuals are on the shelf beside it, and for some of those numbers they are the only place they exist. There is a stopwatch, and out of pure mischief it counts how little of the evening was spent playing.
- 1997
The Eagle MBBS
The same board four years later: ISDN, four lines, Worldgroup. You choose between the terminal and the Windows client at the door, and on the teleconference there are people who know nothing whatsoever about anything after 1997.
- 1998
This page, on a modem
The whole site put back on a dial-up line: grey, Times, eight hundred by six hundred, pictures arriving in four passes, a meter counting up, and a bill when you hang up.
- today
The switchboard
A board of extensions to the things standing on the front page: the lamp, the generator, the counter, the weather. Dial 0 first and then a telephone number, and you are on one of the boards.
It makes sound, and Esc gets you out.