[timoth]

> I remember the excitement when the SB meant my computer could play, e.g., human speech in my games—I forget what the games of that day were; one of the early Ultimas?—rather than just the beeps and boops of the PC speaker (although some people could do amazing things with that speaker!).

They certainly could do amazing things with that speaker. I remember being blown away when I loaded up a PCPlus magazine "superdisk" cover disk some time in the early nineties IIRC and speech came out of the PC speaker -- "Welcome to SuperDisk 61" (or whatever number it was).