The history of the Mac Boot Beep

This post by Andy Hertzfeld over on Folklore.org about the origins of the 1982 Mac's famous boot beep (complete with downloadable 68000 assembly source code) is delicious fodder for more technical minded Mac fans, but this anecdote will appeal even to the more casual appreciator of Apple's corporate mythos:

Charlie [Kellner] was pleased that he was able to make a significant contribution in his first week on the project. Inspired, he asked if he could take a prototype home over the weekend for testing. The next Monday he came into work very excited.
"I knew that something wasn't right!", he exclaimed. "The sound is being completely muffled by the case!. But I know how to fix it."

...He drilled a hole about the size of a dime in a strategic place, which caused the measurements to improve dramatically.

He started demoing his modified prototype, showing how the hole improved the sound quality. The difference didn't sound that significant to me, but it definitely was an improvement. He showed it to Terry Oyama, who designed the case, and asked him if he could add the hole.

The next day, Steve Jobs came by in the afternoon and asked to hear Charlie's demo. He listened to the two Macs, and then decreed "There's not enough improvement! There's no way that we're going to put an ugly hole in the case! Just forget about it!"

Charlie was pretty disappointed, and never got very enthusiatic about the Mac after that. A couple of weeks later, he transfered back to the Apple II group, leaving the boot beep as his only legacy.

Very recognizably Steve. Folklore has a lot of great anecdotes up by Andy about early Apple, Mac and Lisa development, including this hilarious one explaining why Apple went with "OK" over "Do It" for their dialog windows: people thought the software was calling them a 'dolt.'

Boot Beep [Folklore.org via MAKE]

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by chrism , January 22, 2009 7:24 AM

Also of deep geek interest, the (sadly and recently defunct) Music Thing post on the Apple startup sound:

http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/tiny-music-makers-pt-4-mac-startup.html

#2 posted by dacker , January 22, 2009 9:47 AM

I think it was late in '92 when I worked with several pre-production Macintosh Quadra 840AV computers to eventually be the core of a digital imaging workstation product.

These pre-production units did not have the usual startup sound; some enterprising Mac firmware engineer had substituted a clip of Arnold from "The Terminator" saying, "There's one more chip."

As they got close to production, a firmware update replaced this with the standard sound.

#3 posted by Anonymous , January 22, 2009 2:01 PM

I'm a big mac geek, but this still isn't as cool as getting Brian Eno to write your startup sound.

#4 posted by jphilby , January 22, 2009 3:06 PM

All fine and good, but ... I've always thought the Mac startup sound was gagme.

Where's the hack so I can replace it with fine audio of my *own choice*?????

#5 posted by Enochrewt , January 22, 2009 3:49 PM

I thought it was the sound of the computer gods laughing at you for buying a Mac.

#6 posted by zikman