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Someone
coldtea
Potato-tomato
Mauricebranagh
No not really when you got the chime of death it wasn't like a blue screen crash in windows it meant something was very wrong.
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.
coldtea
>No not really when you got the chime of death it wasn't like a blue screen crash in windows it meant something was very wrong.
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.
gamache
I supported Macs in the mid-90s, so I heard a lot of chimes. IIRC the funky chord before the rest of the chime (you can hear part of one at the beginning of the IIcx example) carried actual diagnostic meaning. The one here, again IIRC (it's been a while) means "I have no RAM".
Stratoscope
ThinkPads and other Lenovo machines have something similar called SmartBeep. Here is an example:
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.
WalterGR
It's interesting that different tones were used. That would be difficult to document in any medium that doesn't support embedded sound files.
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
Stratoscope
Ah yes, a slow Morse code dah-dit-dit-dit is burned into my mind from when my original IBM PC had memory errors!
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.
sedatk
Awesome tidbit, thanks!
PhantomGremlin
Yeah, I just revel in stuff like this. In some alternative universe Sheldon Cooper is contributing to HN.
luxuryballs
love these posts, like those EVGA/VGA articles, reminds me of how cheesy, fun, and raw early personal computing was, flying toasters, GORILLA.BAS, having mom yell “sorry” from upstairs indicating in advance that you were about to be booted from your online game because she picked up the phone, getting a copy of Unreal with your AGP Voodoo card, what a fun era that was
sedatk
People will remember these times with similar joyful feelings too. It's not that computing isn't fun anymore, it's us who stopped seeing the fun in things.
dylan604
Yes and no. Not to be cliche, but times are different. Everything now is digital, so all of the fun we used to have with the analog stuff is just gone. You could open up an electronic thing and look at the parts, borrow the parts, modify/replace the parts, etc. Sure, some of these things were litterally the size of the desktop, but lots of learning was had by many a hacker.
nefitty
I fell in love with computers by wasting hours messing with Windows settings and internals. Thinking now, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of space for that sort of stuff in most people’s routines, especially if they’re stuck in a browsing wheel of boredom. My wheel right now is just Reddit and HN and back and forth, and it’s insanely difficult to unhinge myself from it.
Razengan
> Yes and no. Not to be cliche, but times are different. Everything now is digital
What did your elders who grew up with books and radios say of the early computers era you’re fond of?
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luxuryballs
but it’s not as cheesy for sure, everything is all slick and polished and minimalistic, no doubt nostalgia is at play, but there was definitely a “Wild West” of computing back then that in my opinion has only been matched by the emergence of crypto, and an example of the difference might be like, now you can download unity for free and download a sample project and go to town, but back then having Qbasic hidden on your windows 3.1 install and finding the source code for a local multiplayer game ready to run, it’s just like... going to your local farmers market versus going to Whole Foods kind of feel, doesn’t feel like the makers are throwing in any hidden fun stuff anymore, everything is all corporate and streamlined rather than having a handmade feel lurking just under the hood
userbinator
Except for the car crash and the "menacing" one, none of them evoke the feeling of "something wrong", but then again I'm more familiar with PCs, which are less musical in the sense that the normal startup "chime" is actually a beep, but more informational since BIOSes will output different sequences of beeps depending on the exact error.
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.
dylan604
Of all of the "things just went wrong" sounds, the one that gets me is the After Effects error sheep sound. Mainly because I'm usually in an edit session, and the sound tends to be turned up when this happens.
olivertaylor
Haha. I work at a VFX studio and it used to be that the AE rendering machine was the same as the online/finishing machine (the one we'd watch for final approval with clients). Anyway, it was very normal for clients to come in, watch the final version of a music video / commercial and turn the volume WAY up, then leave, and no one would think to turn that machine's volume down. So it was not uncommon to be working late at night and - out of nowhere - the entire office would be filled with the deafening sound of a sheep. Absolutely terrifying.
wu_187
I forget which mac's we had in high school, but ours would always crash in CAD class with a loud "quack". They crashed so much we would all mock the sound throughout class.
krallja
Quack was one of the built-in alert sounds for System 7
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cosmotic
This list is missing many these with the second part: https://youtu.be/n23dp8caq9A?t=66
floatingatoll
When I saw this headline, I immediately hummed the three tone do-dee-duhhh to myself, snorted as I realized I still knew it, and then was surprised to find it missing from the article. It's shown for the first 3-4 computers in this video :) Thank you!
pmiller2
Here's a video with all the Mac startup sounds and chimes of death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTwmtvrdJlQ
I've gotta say, I like the Performa startup sound best, and the later Chimes of Death are pretty amusing. :)
reid
The Mac LC chime brings back memories from dumpster diving for discarded PowerBook Duos and DuoDocks in the late 90s.
chmaynard
The Quadra AV death chime is outstanding. It will make a nice addition to my ringtones collection.
kitsunesoba
I had it set to the alert sound on one of my OS 9 and early OS X machines for several years. It was so well suited for the random trivial error messages encountered in day to day computing in that era.
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amacbride
I had a 6100 and so I can confirm how startling the car crash sound was!
DavidSJ
Same. I heard it once completely unexpectedly and it scared the shit out of me. I was 13.
oliv__
The car crash one is terrible, I bet you'd want to throw your computer out the window after hearing that!
Mauricebranagh
the MAC was normally a write off if you got that sound
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“for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine crashed.”
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.”