On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:42:33 -0800, Gary Kline <kl...@thought.org> wrote: > Oh, yeah. In the late 80's when I joined my Nth startup and worked > with several fellow hackers in a large room, my Sun was the only > one with the click turned on. It drove my fellow programmers nuts, > but that wasn't much I could do. If there were a speaker jack on > the 3/80 computers, I would have been willing to wear earphones...
On early 386 PCs where there was a real "powerful" speaker inside the box, I created a headphone out by removing the speaker and replacing it by a 3.5mm jack, so I could attach earphones. A program I wrote could output waveform data through the PC speaker (in absence of a real sound card), so this was a kind of "do it yourself soundcard". Imagine the fun of connecting a PA. :-) > This older computer was high end in 2003 > but I don't remember seeing a real speaker, so if it's some IC > that's producing the 'beep', I'm outta luck. In "modern" PCs, the speaker is often replaced by a kind of micro-speaker, a black cylindrical object with 0.5mm radius and a small hole in its top. It's a kind of piezo-speaker, sufficient for a friendly little "Beep!" at boot time. The development of recent PCs, as well as of notebooks and netbooks, makes me think that there won't be a speaker (a physical one) in the future anymore. On some systems, e. g. a Siemens-Fujitsu notebook I own, the speaker's functionality is given by the "sound card" and through its speakers, but the control for the speaker is still the "traditional" way. Maybe this way - simply sending 0x07 / BEL, or something like /dev/speaker implements - won't be possible in the future... This will force the output of any sounds through the "sound card" (or its representation by the chip"set" respectively), requiring a specific driver to access the particular hardware. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
