• Kairos@lemmy.today
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    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
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      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
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          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
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            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
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              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?