Remember the hum of a floppy disk drive or the static of a dial-up Internet connection? It’s hard to believe that in just a few years many of these sounds – and the technologies that created them – have all but disappeared. I recently stumbled across a website that is creating an archive of the sounds of old technologies and was taken back by how familiar yet out-dated everything sounded. It was less than a decade ago that the Windows 95 log-on chime could be heard in offices around the world, yet today you’d be hard pressed to find a machine running anything older than Vista. As innovation increases and the time between product lifecycles decreases, it’s not long before the sounds of today achieve old-school status. Next to be added to the archive? My money is on BBM notifications.

Tags: America Online, AOL, Brendan Chilcutt, Cassette, Dial-up Internet, Disc Man, Floppy Disk, Floppy Drive, Mixtape, Museum of endangered sounds, Nintendo Game Boy, Nokia, Old technology, Pay Phone, Rotary phone, save the sounds, Tamagotchi, Technostalgia, TV static, VCR, Windows 95

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