Mac Chimes of Death
512pixels.net
512pixels.net
I don’t think that’s correct. Those sounds played when the power on self test failed, not when the machine crashed (if the machine gets as far as playing that sound, it won’t crash, but very likely will come to an ordinary halt)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_startup: “The classic Macintosh startup sequence includes hardware tests which may trigger the startup chime, Happy Mac, Sad Mac, and Chimes of Death.”
I had as top of the line Quadra AV play its car crash sound on boot once - it it was as dead as a door nail I could even boot it of a floppy.
Yeah, hence my use of potato-tomato (instead of potato-potatoh as is the regular version).
In the sense that it's different but no so much - it's still a case of error reporting sound. Plus, I wanted to do the pun.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/k6fu6y/hey_i_have...
I had some fun with this one, as mentioned in my comment there. I downloaded Lenovo's app and had it listen to the audio in the post, and it told me the error code and recommended steps.
I guess I am easily entertained.
Many BIOSes used a sequence of beeps to convey the error code. Here's a page about this (found via googling for 2 seconds, so standard caveats apply): https://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm
For the new Lenovo beeps, the idea wasn't that you would listen to them and look it up in a doc like you would with the old PC beeps. They were intended for people who would call customer support and say "my computer won't boot and it makes these strange sounds!"
The CS rep would run the app while on the phone call, have the customer reboot, then the app would listen to the call, hear the beeps and display the error code and recommendations.
Of course computers (including mobiles and tablets) became widely mainstream over the years so the percentage of tinkers dropped but the absolute numbers increased.
Really though, the RPi's config.txt is exactly this kind of rabbit hole. I just got a Zero W today and now I'm thinking about if it's possible to underclock it enough to power it with a lemon battery via GPIO.
According to this video I’d need a wall of lemons to get 5V with support for 300mA of current: https://youtu.be/a1D-fZP8qJk?t=205
So it may take some... adjustments... to get something like this to work, but I’ll see what I can do.
It used to have significantly more performance problems, but it's always followed the basic form of "tiny PC with IO pins and overbearing GPU".
What did your elders who grew up with books and radios say of the early computers era you’re fond of?
A book still smells like a book.
You can still buy beautiful books.
In fact, I don't see the difference between the books from my youth and the books now as an adult.
But the IT field is certainly very different.
However, I don't miss the old modems, the hacks to get my maxtor working, clone CD and emule. I don't miss the floppy, black and white low res monitor, the clunky hardware and the slow or no internet.
I like HD. I like thin laptops, WIFI, USB, bittorrent, and a usable linux desktop.
I do have nostalgia for how the discovery of the old internet felt, the sense of community, the ethics and dreams. But it doesn't mean the current one is not awesome.
There are all sorts of electronics besides computers. A CPU is a very small shrunken sets of transistors that are too small for anyone to interact with other than through software (realistically that is). However, older "computer" devices used components large enough you could see and manipulate by hand. The traces on the boards were large enough you could physically scratch/break, and re-wire (reprogramming) causing the device to do something new. To the point, at some stage, stickers reading "No user servicable parts inside" became a thing so people would stop tinkering. That sticker has now been replaced with an apple shaped logo, but they pretty much mean the same thing now.
However, some BIOS authors had a similar sense of humour to Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500363 (the referenced article is now archived at https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/261/Q261186/ )
...and I also have a prerelease Pentium II motherboard that plays (a rough approximation of) the "Intel sound" instead of the usual POST beep.
Edit: here's a video of the BIOS "fan failure warning" sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcoxNp9T1k8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrYK7eOE5R8
I can't find the "it's a small world" one, however.
I've gotta say, I like the Performa startup sound best, and the later Chimes of Death are pretty amusing. :)
The earlier ones that sound like subway tones are much more on point.
it was always fun as a linux/sgi guy to stop by and comment on how well his debugging was going based on chime frequency with occasional jabs about the absurdity of cooperative multitasking mixed in. :)
bum bah dum dum... yowww!
I believe the chime sound listed under this category was also played by the Mac Centris 610 which our family owned. The Centris 610 had a Motorola 68040 chip that definitely ran circles around the Macintosh II. Although I might be getting my wires crossed because we also owned a Macintosh LC at one point that I used once in a while.
Now, if only I could turn on the crash chimes...
A few years (more like a decade now) ago, there were some laptops (not Apple) infamous for overheating to the point of shutting down if you left them in the BIOS setup for too long, or used Linux.
There is, however, a hidden "StartupMute" preference. If StartupMute is enabled, the chime is turned off, and vice-versa.
sudo nvram StartupMute=%00 # turn on the startup chime
sudo nvram StartupMute=%01 # turn off the startup chime
Most wintel laptops do a quiet beep (which you can also disable easily from the BIOS).
- Maxintosh II (and LC) sounds like train departure announcement - Quadra AV sounds like beginning of some 90s jugnle track - car crash sounds like a car crash in DOS game - "Some Random Performas" is bad guy coming to the scene in B-movie - this is my favourite - PCI based macs is plain boring sound
Love the Quadra AV, and I think the PCI-based Power Macs is hilarious.
I got trained to automatically save my file at every single pause in my typing. Finish a sentence? Command-S. Minor edit? Command-S. Paste? Command-V, Command-S. I only noticed when I moved to another computer and muscle memory stopped working.
Linux users of a certain era had to overcome compulsive use of 'sync ; sync ; sync' for much the same reason.
Growing up with home computers in the 80s, I still have this habit. I suspect (without evidence) that it's pretty common. :)
You'll never hear them while doing work on the machine (unless you had it opened up and trying to figure out why it wasn't booting).
This was early-90s, maybe 1/4 of the folks in my dorm had personal computers. I spent 4 days using other people's machines while they weren't, because the labs was already booked solid, and still had to take an extension on one paper.
In conclusion, I like preemptive multitasking.