What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)
That is a pretty awesome tour de force. Somewhere deep inside your computer is an (emulated) PC&#x2F;AT trying to get out :-).<p>An interesting lesson about the use of &#x27;beep&#x27; for the assistive technologies. I see those sorts of things in architectures which have grown up over time and I wonder whether or not you could know at the time &quot;Hey we&#x27;re using this weird thing, please deprecated at your earliest convenience&quot; or if it was more &quot;there I fixed it.&quot;<p>Compatibility at the GPIO level was so ingrained in the PC community early on (there was even a code name for it, &quot;Is it FlightSim compatible?&quot; which referred to Microsoft Flightsim, a game that tested the compatibility limits of clones.) So as a tenet to the community all sorts of hacks could be committed in its name. Something like &quot;Well we can depend on this, if they changed it then it would break compatibility and they can&#x27;t do that.&quot;<p>Also an interesting take on how much Microsoft has had to unwind in a compatible way over the years.<p>Finally, the Linux console used to beep the speaker this way (I have no idea if it still does) and sometimes when I lay there sleeping I would hear my server softly feeping, yes feeping on its console bell. Sadly it wouldn&#x27;t stop until I got up and logged in and figured out what was complaining.