The PC Speaker Was the First Sound Card

Squeezing the soul out of a square pulse

Everyone who used an IBM PC or one of its clones knows exactly what the built-in speaker was good for. It went beep when the machine passed its power-on test, it went beep when you hit the end of a text file, and it went beep-beep-beep when something had gone badly wrong. A game with “PC speaker sound” on the box meant a thin, buzzing melody that you turned off within ten minutes. That little cone behind the front bezel was a diagnostic device, and if it ever pretended to be a musical instrument, it did so with one note at a time and no sense of shame.

Then one afternoon somebody handed me a floppy with a demo on it called Atom. Text mode, colors crawling, three scrollers, the keyboard lights blinking on the beat. And out of that same speaker came a woman singing. Not a beep arranged to suggest a tune: a human voice, with a drum machine behind it, recognizably a pop record.

I remember checking the back of the machine for a sound card that I knew was not there. It took me years to understand how a…