
Andy Hertzfeld on the Original 'Boot Beep' - evo_9
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Boot_Beep.txt
======
SwellJoe
The history of Macintosh boot sounds, including the original:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns3ynH7bFsU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns3ynH7bFsU)

~~~
etjossem
Here's one that includes the "death sounds" played in the event of a crash:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTVmrX6Lee0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTVmrX6Lee0)

~~~
HCIdivision17
Not knowing that the death chimes existed while playing tech support in high
school, I heard one of these.The chime that ascends and then descends off-key
really can send a chill down your spine if you're not expecting it, especially
when the machine dies and won't play it again.

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icebraining
Folklore.org is a great site, and I say this as someone who doesn't really
like the recent Apple at all. The stories about the technical team,
particularly those about Burrell Smith, are just great.

~~~
joezydeco
I'm holding out hope that one day we'll have Folklore.org-style recollections
and inside stories about the making of products like the iPhone. But I'm not
counting on it.

~~~
hkmurakami
I'd have more hope for companies that went down under after being wildly
successful, whose early team members no longer feel the need to stay silent.

Some candidates would include the Delorean car company, RIM (they'll surely
cease to be a going concern with time), some of the Linux companies of the
90s, etc

~~~
LandoCalrissian
This is one I really enjoyed on WebOS developed by Palm.

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-
insid...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story-
pre-postmortem)

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joezydeco
Related: someone has reproduced the beep in Javascript for posterity:

[http://blog.parse.com/2013/02/27/reproducing-the-
macintosh-b...](http://blog.parse.com/2013/02/27/reproducing-the-macintosh-
boot-beep-from-javascript-cloud-code/)

~~~
sgt
I wonder how to get rid of the "smacking" sound at the beginning.

~~~
JonnieCache
Just need to fade the volume up from zero (actually -∞ but never mind) over
the first few samples. Same at the end.

The problem is that the generated waveform does not begin at zero, causing
your speakers to jump from the zero position instantaneously to some other
position when the sound begins playing.

Now, obviously the laws of physics prevent this from actually happening, so
you hear a pop. The lower the pitch of the sound, the louder the pop is likely
to be, for reasons I'm sure people here can work out.

So, the solution is to generate a wave that starts at zero, or add some tiny
fades. Note that music playback software does this when you hit pause/play.
Some of them have an obvious fade you can hear, but they all add some fading,
to avoid popping from stopping/starting the sound in the middle of a cycle.

EDIT: I was feeling ultra-helpful so I took a screenshot of the waveform to
show what I mean: [http://imgur.com/uWOlJcs](http://imgur.com/uWOlJcs)

~~~
sgt
That is indeed ultra-helpful, thanks for the explanation!

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qrr971
this is essentially the same trick that gave birth to Karplus-Strong
algorithm:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karplus%E2%80%93Strong_string_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karplus%E2%80%93Strong_string_synthesis)

~~~
tripzilch
I was thinking the same. Though Karplus-Strong generally starts out with a
triangle, pulse or white noise, if I am not mistaken?

~~~
qrr971
The vanilla algorithm starts with buffer full of white noise. However it
originated as modification to a wavetable synthesizer that modified the
waveform samples as it played them:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUcNzPhZdwk&t=28m34s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUcNzPhZdwk&t=28m34s)

~~~
JonnieCache
Nice video. Need to learn more DSP.

~~~
tripzilch
Depending on what your current background is (need to know a bit of math, very
basic complex numbers, etc), when I started out to learn DSP, this tutorial
helped me loads:

Yehar's DSP Tutorial for the Braindead
[http://yehar.com/blog/?p=121](http://yehar.com/blog/?p=121)

It was an ASCII textfile when I read it, back in 1999, doing demoscene stuff,
someone had coded a _speech synthesizer_ in a 4k demo. So I had to email that
guy to ask them "WAT??" and he answered explaining me basics like how to set
up the Soundblaster with a streaming circular buffer, then sent me to read
this tutorial, and explained loads of other stuff.

I also dug a lot of interesting things from the music-dsp mailinglist and many
articles on Harmony-Central.com. That site still exists, but I can't find
_any_ of the old articles and tutorials related to digital synthesis any more.
That's where I first read about Karplus-Strong physical modelling of stringed
instruments. I think they were in a section called "Music & Computers" or
something, but nowadays that place seems like a weird sort of blog/forum
combo. I always had the feeling that the DSP section of Harmony-Central was
only a small part of the site's intended purpose, does anyone have an idea
where those articles went? (come to think of it, I don't think I've simply
tried old versions on archive.org yet)

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kleiba
Cool story, with a definite hacker vibe to it. It's also understandable that
Jobs didn't want to drill a hole in the case just to improve the boot beep.

Then again, it's cool that he listened to the demo.

~~~
kalleboo
I don't think the hole would only fix the boot beep, it would probably improve
all sound on the machine (as it would all suffer from the same muffling, it
doesn't seem like it was a resonance issue).

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tehwalrus
sadface! enthusiasm shouldn't always be encouraged, but this was a wonderful
contribution! how did computer cases _not_ have holes like this in them
already?!

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swamp40
Charlie Kellner should have looked for a less visible way to get the sound
out. A hole in the back? On the bottom?

Seems simple enough that I bet something is missing from the story.

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icecreampain
That anecdote does nothing to lessen my dislike of marketers and other
similarly worthless people that value form over function.

~~~
danko
But isn't a better sounding boot beep _also_ form? Isn't this really just
somebody choosing form over form? Just because the engineer was an engineer
doesn't make his aesthetic preference (a better-sounding boot beep) any more
empirical than Jobs' aesthetic preference (no extraneous holes in the case).

Also, calling marketers 'worthless people' is a callow statement. I'm an
engineer, but we build the things we make for _people_ to use, so the people
who help other people understand the value in what we make are far from
worthless.

~~~
icecreampain
If you need people to explain to other people why the stuff you build is
great, then maybe the stuff ain't that great after all and you need propaganda
experts to lie to people and fool them into buying your products?

Neither an automobile, a bridge nor a fridge require people telling me how
those two objects can ease my life. It is immediately obvious to me - as all
good engineering projects should be.

~~~
freehunter
You think the automobile was an easy sell when it first hit the market? Maybe
you should read some automotive history. Laws were very restrictive about the
first cars in favor of horses, and people needed some major convincing that
cars were better.

~~~
icebraining
Not just subjected to restrictive laws, but also considered in popular culture
as child-killing machines, and it was a marketing campaign that created the
concept of "Jay Walking", putting the responsibility on people to get out of
the way of the car.

The (great) podcast _99% Invisible_ has an episode about it:
[http://99percentinvisible.org/post/47063460311/episode-76-th...](http://99percentinvisible.org/post/47063460311/episode-76-the-
modern-moloch)

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gnu8
That is far from the original boot beep. PCs were beeping when turned on long
before Macs ever existed.

~~~
rsl7
I suggest you read the article.

