• Kairos@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    24 days ago

    Huh yeah that’s MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.

      • Kairos@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        24 days ago

        Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast “<Type> Error” during startup to be infinitely more helpful.

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          24 days ago

          I don’t think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that’s about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.

            • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              24 days ago

              That would be way more complex to have the motherboard play than a sequence of beeps at different frequencies. Especially at the time.

              • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                0
                ·
                24 days ago

                You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.

                It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.

                But this was an age when a PC would say “Keyboard error. Press any key to continue”, so things were not thought out that well.

                • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  23 days ago

                  If your keyboard was actually working, you pressed a key. If it was not working, you went to get new keyboard. What is “not thought through” about that?