The Nostalgia for Lost Computer Sounds of the 1990s and 2000s

If you used a computer in the 1990s or 2000s, you probably remember how they sounded.

These noises ran the gamut from the scratchy whirs and beeps of dial-up internet, to the trademarked start-up sound of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, the happy dings of MSN Messenger, or even the pffts and zaps of a dot-matrix printer. Computing remains a sonic experience, with people responding with joy or dread, depending on which sound issues from their device.

People seem to be wired for noise, at a basic level. But it’s not just the need for any kind of background hum.

As neuroscientists have discovered, music and other comforting sounds can help trigger memories in people in profound ways. This is sometimes referred to as “music-evoked autobiographical memory,” and it can even be involuntarily induced. Music can be a particularly effective treatment for certain kinds of memory loss, drawing on something from deep within our minds.

According to a Reddit commentator from the early 2020s, “I can still hear the fans cranking up” on his old PC; the sounds of old operating systems can similarly drive nostalgic reflection, with another remarking that “it’s so calming and welcoming” to hear those once more.

Our brains need sound, but particularly the kind that makes us feel good. So, could the tinny, other-worldly sounds from your old Commodore 64 actually improve your well-being?

Nostalgia for an Old-Fashioned Future

Older technologies — including computers — often trigger desire for a future that looks like the past.

There may just be something inherently more comfortable about imagining a future in which fedoras make a non-ironic return and Art Deco designs are commonplace. It’s at least more optimistic  than some of sci fi’s grimmer manifestations.

A positive insistence on the resilience, and even the goodness, of older physical technologies is part of their appeal. This sense of “materiality” of real things and their real presence seems to ground some people during the massive transformations that new technologies portend. Case in point: Many of us remain worried about artificial intelligence, and what it may do to not just our jobs, but our art.

The desire for a more analogue take on the future can be seen in the return of record players and records (the “vinyl revival”) or the millennial fascination with pens and stationary, and a general revulsion to the idea of a fully disembodied future.

The negative reaction to Apple’s ill-advised 2024 ad, “Crush,” which showed beloved analog instruments and devices being crushed into the form of an iPad, is a lesson on the deep-seated love for tangible things that seems to have endured. Samsung made its own ad in response to Apple, featuring a woman playing a busted guitar (implied, in fact, to be a survivor from the Crush ad).

What Lost Computers Sounds Mean for Us Today

The sounds of our youth are tied to memories of supposedly simple times, and to a hopeful belief that machines like computers could make our futures better. Now that our reality is messier, nostalgia for bygone tech can be a calming way to reframe current anxieties. The beeps and pings of yesteryear were mundane, but familiar. They can help fuel a generational nostalgia, even for those who didn’t live through that period.

That’s not a bad thing, as long as we don’t fall for the trap that the past was always a better place. It wasn’t.

Instead, it may be helpful to imagine what kinds of technologies (and their sounds) that might be missed in the future. Perhaps the contained roar of a gas-fueled car starting up (or a hybrid’s low purr), or the whir and whoosh of a dishwasher that’s not connected to the internet in any way, will drive us to a weird kind of wistfulness for the mid-2020s. Or maybe we’ll all be glad we just made it through the decade. It’s hard to predict what we’ll be nostalgic about later. Maybe what counts as nostalgia will change. That’s okay too.

Nostalgia, like anything else, needs to take its time and not show up too soon.