in honor of Sim Wong Hoo, here's a quick historical review of the Sound Blaster! 🧵 
but first we have to go back to their first sound card, the Creative Music System from 1987. (image credit: Bratgoul on Wikipedia)
this card has some special "CMS-301" chips. if you peel back the sticker, they have had their top marks removed. they're actually SAA1099 synthesizer chips made by Philips. Creative wrote music composition software for musicians on the PC.
Creative discovered that there was a far bigger market than musicians making music. and that was the burgeoning PC gaming industry! they renamed the card the Game Blaster. (image credit: nerdlypleasures)
but they had competition: the Ad Lib sound card, released in late 1987 at almost exactly the same time as the Creative Music System.
Creative really wanted to beat them, and they had a plan. some of their software developers requested voice playback, so they decided to take the Game Blaster, add PCM playback, a joystick interface, and Ad Lib compatibility!
the internal code name was the Killer Card. they brought it to the market with an initial price of $239 ($600 in today's dollars).
which was actually a great deal because an Ad Lib sold for $195 and a joystick card was $40. so you'd save a slot in your PC (a big deal back in the day) and get digital playback and recording for free.
to really grind things in, Creative would give you a $100 rebate if you mailed in your old Ad Lib card!
Creative also realized that software support was *critical*, so they had deals going with nearly every major software developer. they mailed out prototype Killer Cards (now called Sound Blaster) like this one to a number of software developers.
since Creative was manufacturing their cards overseas, they were able to aggressively drop the price. one year later the card could be bought for $179!
Ad Lib responded by releasing the 1990 Ad Lib card. which had the previously mentioned 1/8" audio jack. ouch! they were probably still working on the Ad Lib Gold card which they didn't release until 1992.
and in 1992, Ad Lib declared bankruptcy. Creative later had to fight off hordes of clones from Taiwan and China, but the biggest threat to their business model only happened when motherboard vendors integrated audio chips. story for another time.
a footnote: 1987 seems to be a critical year for sound cards. there were companies you've heard of, like Ad Lib, Creative, Roland, and Covox, but there were plenty you haven't heard of, like Forte, Antex, and Innovation.
ever wonder how the Sound Blaster card works? well, i reverse engineered one and wrote it up here: tubetime.us/index.php/2019…
i also dumped the firmware from the Sound Blaster's microcontroller using some pretty tricky methods. i've disassembled and annotated the machine code so you can understand how it works! github.com/schlae/sb-firm…
why did sound recorded by the earliest Sound Blaster sound so awful? Creative used a trick to avoid having to use a (at the time) expensive analog-to-digital converter chip. see this thread.
https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1086465435430604800
since the original 1.0 cards are really hard to find now and expensive when they show up for auction, i've designed a clone that you can build yourself!
https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1086450931472916480
for further reading, here's a good interview with Sim Wong Hoo at Custom PC. custompc.raspberrypi.com/articles/the-s…
Nerdly Pleasures has a good article about the Game Blaster/CMS: nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2012/10/all-yo…
Nerdly Pleasures also has a good technical comparison of the early Sound Blaster cards. nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2010/06/issues…
if you're interested in pricing, Nerdly Pleasures also has an article about that. nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-mu…
there's also a thread at Vogons with links to various articles and advertisements about the sound card competition in the late '80s and early '90s. vogons.org/viewtopic.php?…
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