clicky driver

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:42:33 -0800, Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> 	Oh, yeah.  In the late 80's when I joined my Nth startup and worked
> 	with several fellow hackers in a large room, my Sun was the only
> 	one with the click turned on.  It drove my fellow programmers nuts,
> 	but that wasn't much I could do.  If there were a speaker jack on
> 	the 3/80 computers, I would have been willing to wear earphones...

On early 386 PCs where there was a real "powerful"
speaker inside the box, I created a headphone out
by removing the speaker and replacing it by a
3.5mm jack, so I could attach earphones. A program
I wrote could output waveform data through the PC
speaker (in absence of a real sound card), so this
was a kind of "do it yourself soundcard". Imagine
the fun of connecting a PA. :-)



> This older computer was high end in 2003
> 	but I don't remember seeing a real speaker, so if it's some IC
> 	that's producing the 'beep', I'm outta luck.

In "modern" PCs, the speaker is often replaced by a kind of
micro-speaker, a black cylindrical object with 0.5mm radius
and a small hole in its top. It's a kind of piezo-speaker,
sufficient for a friendly little "Beep!" at boot time.

The development of recent PCs, as well as of notebooks and
netbooks, makes me think that there won't be a speaker (a
physical one) in the future anymore. On some systems, e. g.
a Siemens-Fujitsu notebook I own, the speaker's functionality
is given by the "sound card" and through its speakers, but
the control for the speaker is still the "traditional" way.
Maybe this way - simply sending 0x07 / BEL, or something
like /dev/speaker implements - won't be possible in the
future... This will force the output of any sounds through
the "sound card" (or its representation by the chip"set"
respectively), requiring a specific driver to access the
particular hardware.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...