Chapter 12. Audio
When they designed the original PC 25 years ago, IBM didn't foresee audio as a business necessity, so the only provision early PCs made for audio was a $0.29 speaker driven by a square-wave generator to produce beeps, boops, and clicks sufficient for prompts and warnings. Reproducing speech or music was out of the question. Doing that required an add-on sound card, and those were quick to arrive on the market as people began playing games on their PCs. Early sound cards were primitive, expensive, difficult to install and configure, and poorly supported by the OS and applications. By the early 1990s, however, sound cards shipped with most PCs. By 2001 most motherboards included at least basic integrated audio, and by 2003 it was difficult to find a mainstream system or motherboard that did not have excellent integrated audio.
An audio adapter by itself is useless without some means to hear the sound produced by the ...
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