A TikToker has gone viral for his post sharing the ‘one sound’ that will forever divide generations – or just make you feel old, depending on which side you fall.
It’s a sound those born this century will be entirely unfamiliar with, while those who know it will instinctively tense up when hearing it.
Have you guessed what it is?
He’s talking about the dreaded internet dial-up tone.
Yes, remember the horror? You absolutely had to get online to IM all your mates on MSN the second you got home from school – despite having been hanging out with them all day.
Then your mum would pick up the phone and you’d get cut off (another hardship those youngsters will never understand).
The TikToker, known as The Glass Sniper, said: ‘There is only one sound in this entire world that will forever separate the old generation from the new one.
‘For when the new generation hears it, they’ll have no idea what we’re talking about.
‘And when the old generation hears it, we cringe – for we know the struggle we had to endure that the new generation will never have to.’
The video was completed by a clip of the infamous dial-up tone.
The technical terms for the scratchy, buzzing, nails-down-a-blackboard shrieking is ‘handshaking’, when your computer and the internet provider’s (ISP) modem are ‘negotiating terms’ for a link-up.
The user computer calls the ISP phone number, and it is this call, when the ISP is connecting and verifying your computer, that creates the nostalgic sound.
It was basically calling to ask to go online, but in a less stroppy teenage (yet equally annoying) way than you did.
We say did, but it seems around 400,000 poor souls in the US are still subjected to dial-up, according to the US Census Bureau.
In the UK, BT turned off its dial-up service in 2013 as broadband, introduced in the early noughties, overtook its predecessor.
Still, dial-up was an absolute pioneer of its day, and the first way millions of people first learnt the joys of the internet (for it was almost entirely a joy back then, mainly blogs and creep-free chatrooms, if rumours are to be believed).
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