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RIP: The inventor of the Sound Blaster card
In 1981 in Singaporean, entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo founded a little company called Creative Technology. They released the first major successful sound card for the IBM PC family of computers. The company, known as Creative Labs in the USA, became the first Singaporean company listed on the NASDAQ.
And it revolutionized game play and music on that platform. And more importantly, later Sound Blaster cards provided the interface for connecting CD drives to your PC!
When the PC came out, its sound ability was abysmal. Basic beeps and boops. The PC was a business computer, after all, it came from Big Blue: IBM. You weren't supposed to have fun on it!
But that wasn't what the people wanted! It didn't take long for people to figure out, through PEEKs and POKEs, how to make basic music with PCs because they'd been doing it on Apple IIs and other platforms for some time. But it wasn't very good.
Along comes Sim Wong Hoo with the Sound Blaster. And boy, did it blast sound! Plug in speakers, pump some WAV files into it, and you were rocking!
In addition to the Soundblaster and other cards, Creative came out with portable MP3 players. I had one, a Nomad, about the size of a portable CD player with a 30 gig hard drive in it. I remember when I was first dating Russet and listening to it, making the 500 mile drive back and forth. It's still in this house, somewhere. And it still worked, last time I powered it up. They sued Apple over patent infringements with the iPod and won a hefty settlement!
He was a true unknown and unsung hero of the computer revolution.
https://www.engadget.com/tech-pioneer-sim-wong-hoo-sound-blaster-dies-151258136.html
And it revolutionized game play and music on that platform. And more importantly, later Sound Blaster cards provided the interface for connecting CD drives to your PC!
When the PC came out, its sound ability was abysmal. Basic beeps and boops. The PC was a business computer, after all, it came from Big Blue: IBM. You weren't supposed to have fun on it!
But that wasn't what the people wanted! It didn't take long for people to figure out, through PEEKs and POKEs, how to make basic music with PCs because they'd been doing it on Apple IIs and other platforms for some time. But it wasn't very good.
Along comes Sim Wong Hoo with the Sound Blaster. And boy, did it blast sound! Plug in speakers, pump some WAV files into it, and you were rocking!
In addition to the Soundblaster and other cards, Creative came out with portable MP3 players. I had one, a Nomad, about the size of a portable CD player with a 30 gig hard drive in it. I remember when I was first dating Russet and listening to it, making the 500 mile drive back and forth. It's still in this house, somewhere. And it still worked, last time I powered it up. They sued Apple over patent infringements with the iPod and won a hefty settlement!
He was a true unknown and unsung hero of the computer revolution.
https://www.engadget.com/tech-pioneer-sim-wong-hoo-sound-blaster-dies-151258136.html
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PEEKs and POKEs?
Re: PEEKs and POKEs?
I always wanted a C64 as a kid. Now that I could buy one there's really no point. Eventually I'll be getting a RasPi, I have some experimenting that I'm building some plans on doing.
Re: PEEKs and POKEs?
Re: PEEKs and POKEs?
The first personal computers came out when I was in high school, but my dad never made a lot of money and never bought one. My first PC was a TRS-80 Model 100, which had a built-in LCD monitor, I bought that around '83 or thereabouts. I didn't buy an actual IBM PC-compatible until late '80s, I think. I remember storing tapes in my desk when I worked at the State. Actually, I remember storing floppies there: I once accidentally overwrote a file and drove in to work to retrieve my backup disks to get that file back. It was later that I bought a tape drive for backups, SO much easier! Until HD capacity eclipsed tapes and backups became so much more difficult.
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Hugs, Jon
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It's quite not possible to think where we would be now had we not had inventions like the Soundblaster back in the '90s. If he hadn't worked out how to hook up a CD drive to a card, would we now still be bound to the SCSI interface? It was truly a revolutionary device for many levels.
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