The dial-up modem lives on, in office meeting rooms

Remember the AOL dial-up sound? In case you forgot, here’s Bernz shredding it on Guitar Hero:

Digital data is just bits and bytes. Instead of encoding them in radio waves or good old-fashioned voltages, send those bits and bytes as sound. Dial-up internet repurposed the audio equipment of the telephone network, so that you could watch cat photos load one line at a time and update your AIM status.

That same acoustic modem technology lives on, in meeting room teleconferencing by Zoom. Their support page on Direct sharing for Zoom Room hardware casually mentions, “Ultrasonic sound proximity detection enables the Zoom Room controller to generate an ultrasonic signal that can be detected by the Zoom Desktop Client.”

Artist’s rendering, if the artist was drawing in Google Slides for some reason (me)

It’s a genius idea. Instead of messing with pairing codes (or worse, Bluetooth), you instantly connect using the microphone that’s already required for a Zoom call. It’s like using a QR code to instantly scan a lot more data than you can read and type at once; or two machines doing protocol negotiation to switch from English to binary (not a “secret AI language”, as hysterical headlines claimed at the time).

The only problem I’ve found with the Zoom Rooms is that the “ultrasonic” frequencies used are actually slightly audible if you have good hearing. I hear it as a periodic clicking or chirp, so subtle it’s more of a feeling than a sound. My one consolation is that as I get older and continue to damage my hearing at concerts, I’ll lose the ability to hear it.