Back in the "old days" PCs that failed their BIOS boot had a whole symphony of weird beeps to indicate which failure mode applies. So two short low pitched beeps and one long high pitched beep meant "video bios missing" or something (specific example made up, general idea does apply). I always thought morse code would be an infinitely better user interface. Although I had internet access, this was before widespread adoption of it and well before the invention of the www so you can imagine how much more useful plain english morse code would be for error codes vs seemingly random beep patterns.
I also used to own a pre-ODB2 car which output its "code failures" by a light flashing method very much like the article describes. Three flashes short pause 4 flashes long pause meant engine computer undervolt failure aka its time to replace the five year old battery, or at least it was something very similar.
Besides, you didn't need the internet to look up the error codes when you typically had the dead-tree edition of the same information.
I don't text but my phone had a "ringtone" to announce SMS messages that simply beeped out "sms". I agree that it could have beeped out "GSM 03.41 Short Message Service Cell Broadcast" but "sms" did just as well, much faster.