The Modem: Building The Internet With Sound

[@NewMind]

▶ Check out Brilliant with this link to receive a 20% discount! brilliant.org/NewMind

[@CompleteAnimation]

Makes a five minute intro before even mentioning modems. Like a boss.

[@NewMind]

Go big or go home 😂

[@dmeemd7787]

@@NewMind hell yeah! This channel is INCREDIBLY good! ...and (my trades don't matter, VERY well done!) 😊🤘🏻

[@deanbruckshaw3445]

It’s so that more ads can be packed in and they earn more money

[@chrisakaschulbus4903]

@@deanbruckshaw3445 hahaha, earning money in 2021 with youtube ads... what are you, a comedian?

[@Paethgoat]

If you grew up with a modem you'll remember there's always the dial and handshake before you connect. ;)

[@twothreebravo]

I worked in telephony and early internet as far back as the mid 90s and I have never known the true origin of "BAUD rate" until now. And as a bonus, not once throughout the entire thing did I hear that annoying dial-up modem screech sound. I guarantee that was a conscious decision. THANK YOU.

[@andersjjensen]

Uh.. I sorta missed it for the nostalgia factor (That doesn't mean that I'm not thrilled that we've gotten rid of them for good though!) :P

[@VoidHalo]

I was fascinated and kind of irked to learn that the deciBEL, being 1/10th of a bel was named after Alexander Graham Bell. Between the different spelling for some reason, and it always being used as decibels rather than bels since bels are unwieldy, it never occurred to me. But it's a shame, because there's no greater honour imo than having a commonly used (especially SI) unit named after you. So it seems like kind of an unfortunate scenario for poor Mr Bell that most people don't realize decibels are named after him. Even though most people have heard of a decibel in some context.

[@Gary-Anglebrandt]

So nice to see NSFNET mentioned for once as more than a footnote. I think most people assume ARPANET just grew little by little into today's internet. But it was NSFNET that triggered the explosive internet growth we saw in the 1990s. Its physical infrastructure and much more was built in parallel to ARPANET by Merit Network, IBM, and MCI under the NSFNET program, even as ARPANET withered and shut down. Well done. All your videos are great.

[@samik83]

This was good. Hope you do a follow-up on broadband. Kinda left me hanging on how they managed to push the data rates so far with telephone lines.

[@srpenguinbr]

Pun intended?

[@LarsPallesen]

This video deserves a bigger audience. SO densely packed with high quality history and technical information. Great job! I really enjoyed it.

[@alexandermckenzie5077]

This whole channel is exactly that....the best!

[@TheMadTube]

That was a perfect cold open. Screenwriters should take lessons from you. Stellar job, as always.

[@Bubba_Grimm]

The brilliant ad? 👏 👏 prefect.

[@SECONDQUEST]

I know right? Starting with an ad is so modern and revolutionary. In all seriousness I don't agree, it seemed very generic. Just a "jump in".

[@crabmansteve6844]

I work for a ISP on a hybrid fiber/coax plant. I was so glad to see a video from this channel that I not only innately understand, but work with every single day.

[@chain3519]

I think this is the best explanation of modulation I've ever seen. I appreciate that you keep it visual instead of going straight to jargon and calculus

[@MattyEngland]

It's because unlike most teachers, this guy actually wants to teach people stuff, rather than larping about how intelligent he is.

[@johnpvaldez99]

The presentation quality here is amazing! It's like watching that show NOVA. I was surprised you didn't mention Vint Cerf or Bob Kahn

[@joshuacheung6518]

Oh man, i miss watching NOVA now...

[@stanleyyyyyyyyyyy]

Very well put together! Being a DSP engineer I wrote code for several demodulators using schemes mentioned in the video (fsk, psk, qam) and I can confirm this is no easy topic for general public but this video did it really well. Greetings from Slovakia!

[@Stoney_Eagle]

My parents didn't allow me internet on my own computer, so I used some coax cable (yes coax) to connect to the phone line. Resulting in my parents getting high bills. They switched to ADSL and I wasn't allowed to have internet, so I stole their unused Wi-Fi adapter that came with the package they didn't need and it took me 2 full days to get XP to connect to the WPA2 PSK acces point. My parents just gave in and just let me do their problem solving because they where old people that didn't understand computers. 🤣🤣🤣 I was 14, fun times, fun memory.

[@Alexagrigorieff]

Another thing to increase the phone modem throughput was echo compensation, for near and far echo. A phone line is just two wires with approximately 600 Ohm impedance. If you excite this transmission line with a signal you want to transmit, you'll be getting this signal also as if it were transmitted by your peer. Early modems didn't deal with this crosstalk problem and simply used different frequencies for uplink and downlink directions. But it's possible to separate the transmitted and received signal by means of a duplex circuit, which, in its simplest form, consists of a few resistors. Such circuit is present in most POTS voice phones. The separation, though, is not ideal. Also, because of impedance mismatch, some signal you transmit reflects on the far side and goes back to your receiver, as if it was transmitted by your peer. Thus, V.34 modems employed digital echo compensation. During the calibration phase, they measured the local (near) and far reflection, and subtracted it by DSP code. Far echo compensation was required to allow for two hops over geostationary satellites.

[@computernerdinside]

Fully thing is, from what I can tell, that 300Hz - 4KHz limit for phone systems still seems to often linger around today, where i wish it was better. Hearing above 4KHz would definitely make calls sound clearer, especially on those with higher pitched voices. Otherwise some just sound boomy and it's just frustrating how poor call sound quality is compared to what it could be.

[@ab8jeh]

I feel ashamed that I'd never heard of Ungerboeck before this video. Should be known much more widely, thanks for bringing his work to our attention!

[@samposyreeni]

People still rarely understand what makes TCM tick, because Ungerboek's explanation of the technique is truly opaque. It relies on the set partitionings mentioned in the video, doubling the coding space, dropping symbols, and using a convolutional code to recover the loss. What all that machinery *really* amounts to, though, is to a marriage of coding and modulation in a manner which better approximates how analogue signals work in Shannon's continuous theory - two disciplines which are thought to be orthogonal till then. Technically, it constitutes a method of approximating the Euclidean distance (i.e. S/N ratio) between the modulated, analogue signals by the digital Hamming distance (i.e. number of bit flips in the now coded word), which then leads to a kind of in-band spread spectrum modulation which nevertheless is systematically and optimally decodable wholly in the digital domain, using the (even then well-known) Viterbi algorithm. None of that insight is apparent from Ungerboeck's work, but was explicated only much later. In the original paper, the point is buried under the language of set subdivision which chooses symbol modulations wrt the Euclidean metric, the doubling of the symbol space which leads to many more analogue waveforms being approximable, and then the interconnectedness of those steps which leads to sequences of such symbols being easily decodable by Viterbi even after you sparsify the coding trellis once again. Nowadays, many different high efficiency coding methods draw on the same insight, either implicitly or explicitly. E.g. OFDM is an implicit transform method in that vein, while constellation shaping is a more explicit one.

[@davidgrisez]

I am 73 years old and in the early years of the internet I was using a telephone modem on a computer card rated at 56k. Now those old modems are very slow and have become obsolete. At present I have a cable internet service that has a download speed over 500 Mbps and an upload speed around 22 Mbps. Also we live in the time when plain old telephone service is in the process of being shutdown permanently with all the technology we have.

[@RufianEmbozado]

Your information density and your signal-to-noise ratio are astounding.

[@zenithparsec]

Wow. I am actually not disappointed. I did not expect to see those constellation diagrams, and they were explained in a really clear way. Keep up the good work.

[@jooky87]

Totally reminded me of that modem noise. People forget how much of the internet was built in the 90s

[@jon87386]

This was an amazing watch! I've been fascinated by modems for a while and this was a great documentary on their history and use

[@b1shybob]

Fun trip down memory lane. I had a bunch of the modems shown.

[@mcspikesky]

Idk how I missed this, all your stuff is great and somehow I missed 5 months of content.. you present wonderfully

[@realcygnus]

Nifty AF ! I find the history/evolution of technology almost as interesting as the tech itself.

[@righteousred723]

Modulate, demodulate, repeat. What a life

[@Alexagrigorieff]

Trellis modulation solves a problem of inter-symbol interference. Since a single analog symbol cannot be transmitted without affecting the symbol nearby, the readings of adjacent symbols are offset from the ideal expected positions, thus eating into the noise margin. Trellis modulation compensates for those offsets by essentially employing pre- and post-compensation, through DSP means. In the end, Trellis wins the BER (bit error rate) war, by encoding and decoding more bits than possible or necessary, and getting more correct bits out of that. Another approach for better usage of bandwidth and SNR was employed by Zyxel proprietary 16800 and 19200 bps modems. Those modems partitioned the frequency range into a number of bands, and then the data stream was encoded as several parallel QAM streams. Each QAM stream could use different number of levels, depending on the quality of signal in that band. Later, ADSL used a similar approach, by encoding a block of data through Fast Fourier Transform into a sequence, equivalent to transmission on multiple frequency channels. Each channel could employ different number of bits per block. Thus, extreme non-uniformity of frequency response of a POTS line over ADSL range would not be a problem anymore.

[@code4chaosmobile]

Fantastic video. I even listened to it at 1x speed :) i'm old enough to remember the transition from no internet to internet. When I was in grade school we got to 'tour' the server room for i think was gopher but could be misteaken. how have times changed. keep up the amazing videos and thanks to all involved, you do great work

[@sm3ttz]

This really brought back memories :D

[@kesaranpasaran2630]

After you compress computer science in 4 chapter, now you tackle a one year worth of telecommunication engineering...

[@PatrickBaptist]

[@andersjjensen]

Oh you got me good in the beginning! I didn't even notice that you hadn't even said "modem" once until the "into" ended. Because that wasn't an intro! That was a slight of words trick, and I took it hook, line and sinker! BRAVO! :D

[@Axman6]

I've really got to congratulate you on doing an awesome job of summarising basically a full university course in one video - most of the topics here were covered in my wireless communications course (in much greater detail, of course), and this would be a fantastic introduction to any similar university course. Really excellent stuff.

[@SamlovesLulu]

+1

[@nghalioun]

+1

[@brainfarth]

@13:26 I had flashbacks of my C=64 with a Hayes 2400 war-dialing groups of numbers, looking for unlisted connection points. Lots of fax machines and random access points. One time, I could turn on and off gas pumps in portland somewhere, but we were never able to locate the location. EDIT: I started on a 300baud modem that would usually max out at 100 baud in the beginning. I had an adapter that would allow the Hayes to connect to the C=64

[@lorenpearson1230]

You have disadvantaged generations of future viewers by not playing a clip of two modems negotiating the speed they would communicate at. I also thought faximile would be discussed a bit more as it was certainly a major application of the technology before computers directly. Most pc modems were 'fax' devices that were adapted. Otherwise, as someone who lived much of this and bought all the newest modems as they ve out, and implemented them at work (all the wau through VoIP) this was well done.

[@cope9489]

Great video, wish KZbin would recommend your channel to more people

[@yusufat1]

Man, this is nostalgia. I remembered how EXPENSIVE the tariff was, and how SLOW it was. 1 hour of 56 kbps dial-up was like IDR 10k, while today the same IDR 10k can get me 4 GB on 4G LTE speed.

[@ericbosken3114]

Excellent video! Next video, perhaps you could cover the dsl vs. Cable "modem" wars.

[@bubblehead78]

Superb video. It's amazing how far we've progressed in such a relatively short period of time.

[@alexandermckenzie5077]

Also very interesting how far back electronic data transmission goes...

[@support2587]

This brought back memories, very well done.

[@samsungtvset3398]

At 15:06 it says QAM was introduced in 1984. I was working on Codex 96V29 modems that used QAM in June 1982.

[@rmarca8306]

I had several 56K modems for quite a few years before I had access to broadband, and was never able to achieve 56K connectivity. It was almost always 28.8K, and occasionally I would see 33K, but that was rare.

[@HAL0SINC]

Is it ok that I'm late to work to watch this. Guess not, but I enjoy it. Damn you educational lust.

[@iteerrex8166]

As always professionally done. Thanks NM

[@HyperionBadger]

I've found a new favorite channel.

[@mr.smooth7809]

Amazing job! Man that kept me hooked the whole time. I wanted more!

[@oohhboy-funhouse]

No dial up screech? Ever so slightly disappointed. :D Getting 56K out of a 56k modem is like finding a unicorn, not happening. I remember redialling to get a better connection. The best I ever got was 48K, at worse it fell back to 33.6K. After getting DSL a lot of proverbial coffee stopped being made.

[@mduckernz]

Huh, I very consistently got 56k. On networks in New Zealand, too, so not some really tech heavy country.

[@oohhboy-funhouse]

@@mduckernz What are the odds? NZ also. We were likely unlucky. Our DSL connection was well above average, which was likely due to them installing a cabinet at the end of the street and not using the free modem. Now on rock solid fibre with my own router. They seriously give out the lowest grade garbage. Compared to the US for day to day we are pretty slick among other things, a lot of the US is still stuck with DSL or cable with no real pressure to get better. Oz has probably overtaken the US despite the NBN farce.

[@elyeryan8838]

Last time i was this early US Robotics modem was the coolest gadget ever

[@JoeSmith-cy9wj]

While perhaps interesting, the close-up video of antiquated equipment needs a little touch up. Where did you get find the hardware? The landfill?

[@chain3519]

Shared this with my friends and liked. Fantastic stuff

[@TheWoodWorkingPilot]

I made it all the way to the end of the video, and boy - the real-time footage string made me feel really uncomfortable.. Thanks for sharing. I hope to never have an encounter with a moving blade.

[@rustycherkas8229]

I never could figure out how the hi-res global annihilation graphics were transmitted through an acoustic coupler in that movie "War Games"... :D

[@werre2]

Watching scanned porn jpegs with 2400bps modem increased stamina and patience

[@hansssnet]

Great video! You should do this but for cable modems as well.

[@DMSparky]

What a phenomenal video! Thank you thank you thank you!

[@double-you5130]

oh man and there i was at 4 years old in 85 playing manic miner on my spectrum zx.....

[@knightsljx]

*beeeeeeeep* *beep* *beep* *woorrrttttt* *dooot* *dooot* *beeeeep*

[@Rickmakes]

Didn't dialup providers offer some sort of compression technology to up the speeds even further (for compressible data)? I think they advertised 5X speed increases. I don't know a lot about it because I had moved on to broadband at that point but I have a vague recollection of it.

[@Phil-D83]

I remember 14.4k, 28.8k, and 33.6k and finally 56k. Was all painful until high speed cable arrived

[@sourvenom359]

Wow, the informations in this video are so densely packed I actually had to rewind it constantly to fully understand and really follow chain of thought - I LOVE it! :D I can only imagine how much work has gone into making it - astonishingly good job ;)

[@BariumCobaltNitrog3n]

Information is a mass noun and has no plural, like water, luggage, or happiness. Information in this video is densely packed. Peace. Please have nice day.

[@cloudgalaxy9231]

Of course I'm upvoting though. Of course.

[@18bagabooo]

Basically my 2nd university year in electrical engineering (communications module) summed up in 25 minutes

[@sharshabillian]

Thank you for the info-dense videos. May I ask if every video is a summary of a book? It seems like a lot of research to get this information together. If it is indeed based off a certain book, could you recommend that?

[@anti-popfpv4638]

I remember accidently hacking the internet in 1995. We just got a computer and internet, being very poor that was something. I never understood what is was then but i remember getting this blue screen with FBI warning. It froze our computer and my step dad had to call the number and get computer unlocked. Has anyone else had this experience or could clarify what could have actually happened?

[@ESS284]

That was bloody fantastic.

[@erichobbs4042]

ATDT ... Now there is a command that I have not remembered for many years

[@dewiz9596]

Fascinating stuff! Thank you.

[@stachowi]

Hell yes! Loved every minute of this, your content is amazing

[@abalcerzak1931]

I've never understood how binary based information (I mean 0 and 1) can be transfered via waves as see at 9:30. Those illustrations makes me feel like I am missing something. Waves looks likes they never change so where is the difference between a 1 and a 0 ? Is this difference created by slightly changing the frequency ? Or the power ? Or by emitting and stop emitting x times a second ? If yes how many times and how do you make the difference between "no information emitted" and "information maybe emitted but lost before the recieving end" ? Can someone explain it to me or give me a link ? Sorry for my bad english

[@guyh3403]

Thank you very much!

[@aut0turret]

I came here for the sweet song of 14.4Kbps. Didn't even get to hear 300. Still great video though.

[@skoalsoldier]

Bro, we needed a dial up “screeech bidee bidee, shhhhh SHHHHH” at least once. For even a moment lol

[@IgorMuravsky]

I was expecting long forgotten modem sounds somewhere in video... :(

[@izaakgray1718]

19:54 Behringer X32 paramteric EQ screen?

[@burrito-town]

Why is the audio in this video so quiet? Right click on the video and select 'Stats for Nerds'. From there, you can see that KZbin measures the audio as more than 11 dB too quiet. That's way too quiet. You need to check your levels before/after uploading to KZbin.

[@SantoshKumar-pz2oj]

Please make a video explaining pixel led controller and software

[@righteousred723]

Hyperlinks could have been so much more

[@sergiogarcia2984]

Esta bien chingon te quedo poca madre te amo

[@btno222]

COMPUSERVE, AOL, ROADRUNNER....AOHELL, CITADEL, GODANTI, ANTPUNT, MAGENTA

[@alexlandherr]

Could you please cite your sources in the video description?

[@YannMetalhead]

Good video.

[@mage1over137]

@1:52 aws has been around for long time.

[@dmeemd7787]

sweeeet!! new video!! 🤘🏻

[@BullCheatFR]

Funny how you used to get internet with a phone line, and now you get a phone line with the internet.

[@jamestunstell9255]

bring it up to date?

[@benji376]

Amazing

[@yachidan]

Waiting for your new video, any ETA?

[@TheKdcool]

What about ADSL and ADSL 2+?

[@TheOpticalFreak]

This makes me think we actually need to split up the internet !! Like it used to!! Ban politics and entertainment rubbish!! 👍😁 Let them have there own www. 😉

[@vxqr2788]

I like it

[@mumblic]

Brilliant in not the sponsor, you are!

[@asep.acep..junaedi9005]

After i made AssisstenKU i made Computer AssistenKU.

[@BariumCobaltNitrog3n]

The fax (facsimile) machine was invented in 1843

[@Gome.o]

Pioneering minds: We need to develops a system that allows us to communicate in the event of an apocalypse Common every man: So we can watch porn on this right?

[@TheRustAdmin]

"dada"

[@PushyPawn]

92% Complete, after ten minutes of downloading a short, pixelated porno clip when mum picks up the receiver at the other end of the house... Nooo... 🤯🤬

[@asdasikdaisncxzinaskdnmf]

yeah lost me at 8:19, what am i even looking at lol, baud? lol what

[@karozans]

And here 30 years later after billions of dollars have been spent, the internet is used mostly for pron.

[@BertGrink]

I´d say it´s split roughly 50/50 between PR0N and cat videos. 😅

[@Alexagrigorieff]

It's not quite correct to describe 16-QAM modulation in terms of amplitude levels and phase shifts. More proper is to describe it as a sum of sine and cosine components, each having 4 levels.

[@umetsunota8875]

Don’t be Dramatically ..

[@commiezombie2477]

ZzzzZzzzZzzz bruh didn't even include the trademark sound. 😑

[@zacharyhenderson2902]

I did not hear a dial up tone once. Disappointing