The forward march of technology has a drum beat. These days, it's custom text-message alerts, or your friend saying "OK, Glass" every five minutes like a tech-drunk parrot. And meanwhile, some of the most beloved sounds are falling out of the marching band. The boops and beeps of bygone technology can be used to chart its evolution. From the zzzzzzap of the Tesla coil to the tap-tap-tap of Morse code being sent via telegraph, what were once the most important nerd sounds in the world are now just historical signposts. But progress marches forward, and for every irritatingly smug Angry Pigs grunt we have to listen to, we move further away from the sound of the Defender ship exploding. Let's celebrate the dying cries of technology's past. The follow sounds are either gone forever, or definitely on their way out. Bow your heads in silence and bid them a fond farewell. Above: The Telephone Slam Ending a heated telephone conversation by slamming the receiver down in anger was so incredibly satisfying. There was no better way to punctuate your frustration with the person on the other end of the line. And when that receiver hit the phone, the clack of plastic against plastic was accompanied by a slight ringing of the phone's internal bell. That's how you knew you were really pissed -- when you slammed the phone so hard, it rang. There are other sounds we'll miss from the phone. The busy signal died with the rise of voicemail (although my dad refuses to get voicemail or call waiting, so he's still OG), and the rapid click-click-click of the dial on a rotary phone is gone. But none of those compare with hanging up the phone with a forceful slam. Tapping a touchscreen just does not cut it. So the closest thing we have now is throwing the pitifully fragile smartphone against the wall. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Modem Go ahead and imitate the bleep bleep boop hiss of a 56k modem in front of anyone under the age of 20. They'll give the same look a dog makes when you present it with a hardcover book as a toy. But those noises where the first indication that you were joining, at the time, a new and wonderful world. A connected world where information (most of it wrong) flowed freely, and you could talk with both friends and complete strangers without running up a huge phone bill. Now, everything is constantly connected, and internet access is like electricity. It's just there. But there was a time when your desire to chat on IRC and check on your Geocities' guestbook was behind a magical handshake of beeps and hisses, all coming out of a tiny box plugged into your landline. Photo: Ralf Kühne /Flickr

Tape Hiss The cassette tape was the default music-delivery system of the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. Tape had its flaws, but it was a super cheap and convenient format for capturing sound, and its mechanical underpinnings gifted us tape-junkies with a wealth of auditory memories. Tape wobble, for one. But first and foremost, it's the hiss that makes the cassette tape special. That haze of not-quite-complete silence primes your pleasure receptors and tells you that something awesome is headed for your ears. That hiss was there to introduce the opening riff of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," or to serve as a prelude for the bass drum hits of "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'." And as soon as the hiss went away, you'd wait for the clunk of the motor stopping and get up to flip the tape. Or, if you had an automatic deck, you'd sit back and wait for the cassette to switch to side B -- the sound that indicated that this party was never gonna stop. Photo: Zoe Biggs/Flickr

Advancing Film in a Camera While the sound of a camera's shutter lives on as a nostalgic audio nugget on your smartphone, the mechanical film advance sound has no place in the digital world. After taking a photo with an SLR, your right thumb would advance the roll of film inside the camera by pushing a lever from left to right a few times. The ratcheting sound would signal that that the photo you just took was being filed away for later. Every once in a while, you'd hear the nerve-wracking sound of the plastic teeth just missing the perforations in the film, crunching the delicate film and gunking up your roll, possibly irretrievably so. Even when the roll advanced smoothly, it would serve as a reminder that you'd better make the next photo count, because this roll won't take the hundreds of photos available now with large capacity SD and CF cards. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Friction-Shifting a Bike Shifting gears on a bike used to be all about finesse. Before the onset of index shifting, where each gear on your bike can be dialed in with a "click" of the lever, and way before the arrival of Di2 and electronic shifting systems that change your gears with the press a button, shifter levers were tricky. By reacting to the feel of your chain engaging with the new gear, you could determine just how far to push or pull the lever to keep your bike moving forward. Even after you caught the correct gear, a slight clacking sound would tell you that your derailleur was just a little bit out of alignment, and your chain was on the cusp of coming off a cog or falling off a chainring. It was a game of tiny adjustments. Now, a bike's drivetrain shifts about as reliably as a car's transmission. They can be tuned to remove all the guesswork, and the chain drops directly into the desired gear every time. You never have pause your iPod to listen for the "clickity-clack." Photo: Robert Couse-Baker/Flickr

The Typewriter Unless you frequent hipster cafes, where there's always that one guy who believes his writing is "so much better" thanks to his IBM Selectric typewriter, the thwack thwack thwack that defined a generation of writers is gone for good. Replaced only two decades ago by the mousey patter of the computer keyboard, the machine gun attack of the typewriter drove home the fact that every letter, every word, meant something. Even if you had a model that could erase a mistake with a second ribbon, the typewriter still stabbed at the paper again, reminding it that it was only as good as the words that remained. Also: the ding of the alert bell, and the clunk of the carriage return lever. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

Skipping CDs When the Sony Walkman became the Sony Discman, it showed up with a magical anti-skip technology that didn't really work that well. CD players -- especially the portable kind -- were notorious for skipping if they were moved, bumped, or breathed upon. Smudges on the underside of a CD would also cause erratic behavior. What resulted was a skipping sound not unlike that of a vinyl record being manhandled by a deranged meth addict. The CD would replay a snippet of music just a fraction of second long, repeating it about 20 times in a row before moving on to the next tiny sliver of sound. The typical skipping CD scenario is as follows: taketaketaketaketaketaketaketaketaketaketaketaketake mememememememememememememememememememememememe dowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdowdow nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn (silence as CD player gives up and becomes unresponsive for 20 seconds.) It sounded like Max Headroom throwing up. Digital files, on the other hand, don't skip. Sure, if you "borrowed" the file from the internet, or if it was ripped from a scratched CD to begin with, you can get a few random chirps or even a song that just doesn't play. But that will never replace the secret techno dance track you discovered right in the middle of your dirty old Skid Row CD. Photo: Nic5702/Flickr

The Payphone Unless you're running from the cops, the mob, or the student loan people, you'll probably never use a payphone again. Hell, you probably can't even find one. The payphone's last hurrah was the age of the pager. When you received an incoming page and suddenly needed to find a payphone, it was a quest worthy of the Knights of Templar. And while the physical click-slide-jangle of your change landing in the phone's holding area was memorable, it was the 2600hz tone that sounded into the earpiece that resides in the tiny crevices of your brain. So unique was the noise that it could be mimicked by hackers for free phone calls. One you had finished the call and hung the phone up with a satisfying (and probably germ-filled) thud, all your change would drop into the phone's piggy bank. Photo: Adnan Islam/Flickr

The CRT Television The only TVs left that still use cathode-ray tubes are stashed in the most depressing places -- the waiting rooms of hospitals, used car dealerships, and the dusty guest bedroom at your grandparents' house. But before we all fell prey to the magical resolution of zeros and ones, boxy CRT televisions warmed (literally) the living rooms of every home in America. The sounds they made when you turned them on warmed our hearts, too -- the gentle whoosh of the degaussing coil as the set was brought to life with the heavy tug of a pull-switch, or the satisfying mechanical clunk of a power button. As the tube warmed up, you'd see the visuals slowly brighten on the screen, giving you ample time to settle into the couch to enjoy latest episode of Seinfeld. Photo: Dennis Hlynsky/Flickr

Blowing on a Nintendo Cartridge Sometimes you just want to play Metroid, but that damn Nintendo Entertainment System won't load the cartridge. So you'd blow on the cartridge and shove it back in console. Like magic, Samus would be ready for battle. While the method may differ (from blowing directly into the cartridge, to blowing at angles, or blowing as you moved the cartridge across your lips), the hollow howl of your breath against the dark grey slot of your NES game probably did little to make the game work. In fact, it probably made things worse by causing your spit to gum up the works. Today's consoles and their optical media and digital downloads don't want your mouth anywhere near them. Rubbing tiny silent circles is currently the best way to get an unreadable disc to behave. We've gone from blowing dandelions to cleaning the good silver. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired