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Cupholder.exe (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 23 points 2 years ago (16 children)

Sadly, many motherboards don't have POST code displays.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (15 children)

    Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast " Error" during startup to be infinitely more helpful.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I don't think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that's about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.

    It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I definitely remember short 2 or 3 second clips of relatively high quality music being played through our family's IBM XT's motherboard speaker at one point using a demo we got from a BBS or the Public Domain Software site in the mid-80s. It wasn't easy but some madman made a proof-of-concept that did it and it was incredible at the time.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    Ohhhh right. Well its worth the <$1 of input costs.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    That would be way more complex to have the motherboard play than a sequence of beeps at different frequencies. Especially at the time.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You could just about play speech using one bit output using pulse-width-modulation. But it was almost unrecognizable. And would take a lot of memory for the time.

    It was usual to have different numbers of beeps for POST errors.

    But this was an age when a PC would say "Keyboard error. Press any key to continue", so things were not thought out that well.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Would any of your tech-handicapped relatives actually pay it any attention, though?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    Yes

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Can we trade relatives?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Tip: be passive aggressive and sarcastic when helping them. It both teaches them the solution in a memorable way, makes them not want to get help from you again, AND makes them think twice before doing so.

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