When Computers Talked Out Loud
What the dial-up modem was actually saying, and why every tech shift since has asked the same question.
Do you remember that noise? The one your computer used to make when it dialed up the internet — the hiss, the static, the rhythmic beeping that ended with “You’ve got mail.” If you’re old enough to remember it, the sound is probably already playing in your head.
As the youngest member of our team, I only caught the tail-end of dial-up before my family upgraded — and I wondered: why did it sound like that? Was the noise some kind of branding decision, a way to make the computer feel or sound like it was doing something?
The actual answer is more interesting. That sound was the modem talking, in binary, translated into audio, transmitted over the same copper telephone lines your grandmother used to call your aunt. When your computer dialed in, the modem on the other end picked up and the two of them started a conversation — what’s called a handshake.
They were introducing themselves and negotiating a data rate. Hi, I’m here. This is the speed I can support. Can you keep up? Okay, let’s talk at that speed instead. It was audible because it had to be. Phone lines carry sound, so if you wanted two computers to communicate across a phone line, you taught them to make noise.
Think of the old telephone switchboard operators. The ones in the black-and-white photos, headsets on, pulling cords from one hole and plugging them into another to move a voice from one line to the next. Your modem was doing roughly the same thing, just faster, and in a language you weren’t meant to understand.
There’s something genuinely charming about it once you sit with it. The internet, in its first widely accessible form, was two machines audibly figuring out how to be friends.
The same conversation revealed that not everyone in the room knew what AOL stood for. (America Online.) Or AIM. (AOL Instant Messenger.) These were acronyms most of us said constantly for years without ever stopping to ask what the letters meant. They were just the names of things: the rooms we hung out in after school, the way we got mail, the way we knew our crush had logged on because their screen name showed up in our buddy list. At some point, we stopped using them, and we couldn’t tell you when. The acronyms quietly got replaced by app icons, which got replaced by notifications, which now arrive on a screen that doesn’t ring, doesn’t beep, and never makes the sound of a handshake.
Sixteen years of watching this happen
Ilya started inWorks in 2010. That’s sixteen years ago, which sometimes feels short until you list what changed in between.
In 2010, business IT meant, quite literally, wires in walls. Server rooms with humming hardware, blinking lights, and a person whose job it was to know which cable went where. Email lived on a box you could touch. Files lived on a drive that was physically present in the building. If the box broke, somebody drove out and looked at it.
Then the cloud happened. The boxes moved off-site, the files lived somewhere nobody could point to, and the things people used to walk up to and unplug became abstractions. It happened in pieces, over almost a decade, until one day people realized they hadn’t physically touched or seen a server in years. The wires were still there, technically. They were just somebody else’s wires now, in somebody else’s building.
Now we’re watching it happen again. AI is the next layer. The thing that used to sit in a server room, then moved to the cloud, is now being augmented by models that draft, summarize, route, decide, and suggest. Some of the work that used to require a person at a keyboard for hours is increasingly happening in conversations between software and software — a different kind of handshake than the dial-up one, but a handshake nonetheless.
What stays the same
Every shift like this has an uncomfortable middle. There’s a period where the old way still works, the new way is unfamiliar, and nobody is quite sure how much to trust the change. People who lived through the dial-up-to-broadband shift remember that middle. People who lived through the on-prem-to-cloud shift remember it too. We’re in one of those middles right now with AI, and most of the business owners we talk to are somewhere inside it: experimenting cautiously, hearing too much hype, watching competitors do things that may or may not actually be working, trying to figure out what is worth investing in and what is a fad.
What stays consistent across all of these transitions is the question underneath them: do the people using this technology actually understand what it is doing, and do they have someone trustworthy to call when they don’t? That question was as important when modems were negotiating data rates out loud as it is right now, when an AI agent might be drafting a customer email on somebody’s behalf.
Sixteen years in, that’s still the question we build around. The tools change, the acronyms change, the wires move from the wall to the cloud to wherever they’re going next. The job of making technology actually work for the people doing the work has not really changed at all.
If you’re sitting inside one of these middles
That’s a conversation we have all day. We have been having it in different vocabulary for sixteen years, and we are happy to have it in whatever vocabulary makes sense for your business — wires, cloud, AI, or all three at once.
Call us at 267-857-8066 or leave a comment below to talk it through. We will take an expert look at what you have been doing with AI and tell you honestly what we think.