Sound Blaster
More info
- Creator
- Creative Technology
- Released
- 1989
- Type
- PC sound card
The sound card that made the PC audible — and whose name was printed on the back of every game box for a decade.
Before 1989 a PC sounded like a beeping speaker while home computers had real sound chips. Singapore's Creative Technology combined three things on one card: FM synthesis compatible with its rival AdLib, digital playback of sampled audio, and a game port for the joystick. The combination was exactly what game developers needed.
The market responded by making the card the standard. "Sound Blaster compatible" became a requirement rather than a feature, and clones were built to imitate that specific card's registers. Only when Windows put a driver layer between games and hardware did the need for every program to know the sound card in detail disappear.