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thewayneIn 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
no subject
Date: 2023-01-15 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-15 09:46 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-15 03:16 pm (UTC)