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Showerthoughts @lemmy.world

12mo ago

Dial Tone

Sometime, probably close to 20 years ago, but perhaps more recently, you heard a dial tone for the last time and you didn’t even realize it would be.

63 comments

I will never be silenced!
- I’ve been meaning to ask, has anyone ever told you your F is a tad sharp for equal temperament? I’m not suggesting you change. I think your clean beat frequency makes you pretty cool just the way you are.
  
  I first read it
  has anyone ever told you F
  And thought it was going to be a joke continuing OP's thought 🫡
- Did you... join during the Rexodus and wait all this time just for this joke? 🤣 (if there is a more mundane explanation, I don't want to know - I prefer this one:-)
  
  I'm so angry today, that I didn't even catch the joke. It wasn't until I was making my own reply of confusion that I needed to copy the username of who said that, that I realized their name was /u/dialtone
  Then I got their joke. I still don't know what a Rexodus is though.

Dial tone still exists. Pretty much every business phone that’s most likely a VoIP line still generates dial tone to the user’s headset.
- That’s just sparkling doot
  
  Man, reading this sentence felt like a little electric jolt to the brain as it pieced the memes together.
- Indeed, but most people will not hear it anymore as they don't use business phones, same as ordinary landline phones
- You can pick up a payphone anywhere that still has them and most of them will play a dial tone, though those are starting to dwindle.

Last time I heard a dial tone was just a second ago when I pushed the speakerphone button on my Cisco ip phone.
- Ceci n'est pas une tonalité
- It's actually fake, though. IP phones "play" that. Also, when on a call, they insert "comfort noise, that very low hiss you may hear, to augment the odd feeling most get with crystal clear VOIP audio.
  
  It's only a dial tone if it comes from a land line
  otherwise it's just sparkling audio lies
  
  Well, it's generated in the same way as modern tones are in a telephone exchange, not a played sample. You can usually configure the tone frequencies (never tried on cisco ip phone, but asterisk allows it for its own generated tones and I had a cisco ATA that let you configure them).
  So, unless we're limiting ourselves to the original mechanically generated dial-tones. I'll consider them for all intents and purposes to be one and the same.
  E.g. for the UK on cisco/sipura ATAs you would use the configuration found here https://teamhelp.sipgate.co.uk/hc/en-gb/articles/208200875-UK-Regional-Settings-Cisco-Linksys-Sipura-Adaptors and as an example (dial tone)
  Dial Tone: 350@-19,440@-22;10(/0/1+2)
  The comfort noise is also generally only added when there's no other noise on the call. This is to prevent you thinking you were disconnected when no-one is talking.
- Was coming to type this.
  
  You have an odd fetish

I still hear a dial-up modem when I close my eyes
- But can you tell the difference between 28.8 and 33.6 just by listening?
  
  yes
  
  I don't understand the need for these. I can't read text faster than 300 baud anyway.
  
  I used to confuse my 56k modem in 1998. I used to pick up the phone and make modem noises. It used to "connect", and then IMMEDIATELY spew out a diarrea of errors that it wasn't connected.
  I miss the 90s....
  
  We tech support folks used to be able to discern a legit US Robotics 56K over a software modem. By listening to our customers connect.
  
  300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 19.2, and 56k yes.
  I don't remember 28.8 and 33.6 sounds, though. I guess my life has been for nothing :(
  
  Ngl I wish I was of the generation where I could've acquired this skill. As it is, I just have the faint childhood memory of our home modem. (In my 30s, for reference.)

I have a landline, I hear a dial tone every time I pick up the phone.
- Low-key way of informing everyone that nobody ever calls your landline.
  
  Or that they're the ones making all the calls.

I listen to it every day at work when connecting to customers alarm systems.
- Necromancer

- Sorry to nitpick... Tinnitus is more likely to introduce high-frequency sound than the 440Hz dial tone. If anything, that is the one frequency that old-timey phone techs would eventually struggle to hear...

On a similar note for parents: At some point, you did/will pick your child up and then put them down for the last time.

I have a captain crunch whistle so I hear it anytime I want to!
- BZZZZT
  
  That is a VERY powerful vibrator you have there. Not a bumblebee, is it?
- You were one of those people.
  It is still wild to me that a cheap toy was able to "hack" the phone systems back then.

What's even worse is in some countries the file tone was a pretty good match for a guitar note so some musicians would use it as a starting point to tune their guitars.
- True, I remember tuning my guitar to it. Thanks for bringing back that memory.

I heard one about a week ago

My phone makes a dial tone the moment I press a single key on the keypad to make a call. 🤷🏻‍♂️
It's not the same as picking up a landline; it's just the phone app adding it probably to let you know you're dialing.
- Are you sure about that? Dial tone is a sound you hear before dialing, not the sound you hear when you press a key.
  
  I'm old enough to know what a dial tone sounds like. On this phone's phone app once you hit a key, it'll make the key tone and then start making the droning dial tone sound until you finish dialing or hit the back button to cancel.
  The only reason I can think of for them to put this in the app is to let you know you've got it open and some numbers have been pressed to prevent butt dialing. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I heard it last night in a movie. From an actual phone, it's been a few years, but less than 10. EDIT: actually, less than 3 years as I had to fax paperwork to get my internet. Japan!

My work has landlines, so I still get to hear it

I don’t know. I have several old phones and a touch tone dialing adapter. I like the experience. I can say with high confidence that I’ll hear a dial tone in the future.
Plus, watch any movie from the seventies through the nineties that includes a phone, and you’ll probably hear a dial tone.

Sadly, I had to fax documents recently.

Same for the R2D2-56k gatekeeper of the internet; master of the slow reveal.

My office phone has a dial tone. It's VOIP but when you pick up the receiver it BOOOOOOOPs... So I think it was last week I heard one...
Hopefully not for the last time...

Sometimes I pick up the phone behind my desk and just listen to the dial tone. Having a voip line from my fiber internet provider is cheap. Sometimes I’ll use it to connect my old computers to the line and dial into the few remaining bbs.

My work uses VoIP and when I call anyone I hear a dial tone.

Sadly my parents’ new IP phone service uses the dialtone as some kind of branding trick - you go off-hook and get this “designed” audio prompt that slides into a normal dialtone, presumably to make you remember you’re not just using “the phone”. It was very disconcerting when I first heard it.

I hate you.

63 comments