He founded Creative in 1981 and ran it ever since:
Creative Technologies founder, CEO and chairman Sim Wong Hoo has died, his company has confirmed. He "passed away peacefully on 4 January 2023," according to a press release. He was 67 years old.
It might seem hard for younger readers to believe, but there was a time that computer sound wasn't guaranteed. If you wanted to plug in headphones or speakers that could do more than bloops or bleeps, you probably needed a sound card — and none were as successful as Creative Labs' Sound Blaster. It sold over 400 million units as of its 30th anniversary in 2019.
In the pre-Windows 95 / DirectX era, few words in PC gaming were as important as the phrase "Sound Blaster compatible," allowing players to hear the dogs bark in Wolfenstein 3D, or mess around with the synthesized voice in Creative's Dr. Sbaitso demo (you can play it on the web these days).
The company was also huge in the MP3 player space with its Creative Nomad and Zen line of players and successfully sued Apple over its iPod, obtaining a $100 million settlement.
Success wasn't immediate. Originally, Sim set out to build an entire computer that could talk, according to 1993 and 1994 profiles of the man at Bloombergand The New York Times. He founded Creative Technologies in Singapore in 1981, and yet by 1986 — two years after Steve Jobs let the Macintosh "speak for itself" — the company's PCs had sold so poorly that he was reportedly down to just a handful of engineers.
But when they took the Cubic CT's music board to a computer exhibit in the United States, the company found its footing. "The money we made on a few hundred boards was the equivalent to the money we made on the PC," he told the NYT.
Even then, the idea hadn't quite congealed. Creative's first sound card was sold as the Creative Music System before it realized that PC gamers would become its biggest audience. In 1987, Sierra On-Line wowed the gaming industry by releasing King's Quest IV with an actual soundtrack score, designed to be played on early sound cards like the AdLib and Roland MT-32, and the publisher went on to advertise those PC parts for sale in its own catalog of games.
Creative got a piece of that action by rebranding its card the "Game Blaster" in 1988, and in 1989, the company's first Sound Blaster added a dedicated game port to plug in a joystick. That's something that PC gamers usually had to buy separately and helped make the Sound Blaster look like an excellent deal over the AdLib.
Sim's determination made him a rare symbol of Singaporean startup success, as Creative became the first Singapore company to be listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange. In 1994, The New York Times' headline was literally "Entrepreneurial Company Defies Singapore Model," and he went on to author a book called Chaotic Thoughts from the Old Millennium where he coined a phrase, No U-Turn Syndrome, to describe an underlying difficulty in becoming an entrepreneur in that era of Singapore culture.
[...] Creative hasn't exactly been a household name in recent years, but it still sells popular soundbars like its Sound Blaster Katana, speakers, webcams, and earbuds. There's even still a dedicated Sound Blaster sound card in its lineup.
And, I hear, the Audigy 2 is still going strong in some people's PCs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 08, @05:00PM (7 children)
If might be hard for TFA's author to believe, but you could do more than bleep and bloops without a sound card.
The Apple II for example could create almost convincing sounds of any kind by PWMing the one-bit speaker toggle. You could make a very capable 8-bit DAC "soundcard" with the Atari ST with an el-cheapo PCB with 8 resistors across the cartridge port's address bus. A few pieces of ST software - early samplers and such - took advantage of that hardware.
What the modern soundcard brought to the table was freeing the main CPU from having to drive the hardware in real-time. Because of course, if you wanted digital sound with any of those early machines, the CPU basically spent half of its time doing the sound thing and nothing else.
With the exception of course of even earlier forms of sound generation. For instance, this fabulous dot-matrix printer rendition of Eyes of the Tiger [youtube.com] or this multi-flopy drive rendition of Pirates of the Carribean [youtube.com] :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08, @05:37PM (1 child)
The Atari ST also had sound chip but I don't think it could play back sampled sounds the same way (e.g. without much CPU involvement).
The Sound Blaster was the first popular/mainstream IBM PC sound card with PCM capabilities.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday January 08, @06:36PM
The Sound Blaster was the first popular/mainstream IBM PC sound card with PCM capabilities.
And it sure was popular. The list of old games which supported use of the Sound Blaster card [vgmpf.com] is quite long.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 08, @07:37PM
I had fun coding a PWM output for the Apple ][ in 6502. It could do it, but there wasn't a lot of time left over for doing anything else during output. It's amazing that it worked at all, it was clearly not what the hardware was designed for.
The Sound Blaster wasn't the first digital output for a computer by far, but it was a pioneer in affordable and decent quality digital audio for the PC which was rapidly taking over the personal computer space. IIRC, the AdLib had FM synthesis but no digital audio without playing dirty tricks using the output volume.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mcgrew on Sunday January 08, @10:08PM (2 children)
If might be hard for TFA's author to believe, but you could do more than bleep and bloops without a sound card.
Not with what they called a PC back them; an IBM or compatible which normally wouldn't do more than beeps and boops, although other microcomputer configurations like the Tandy and Apple had decent sound built-in. The PCs were designed for offices. But there was actually a program about the time the Sound Blaster came out that would actually make the built in speaker talk, in English (using phenoms). It impressed me!
I had quite a few sound blasters, and they were a royal pain in the ass with DOS computer games; you would have to set up interrupts and so forth. I used Debug to write a four byte program that would reboot the computer, making games a lot easier with DOS batch files.
</uphill in the snow both ways>
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday January 09, @03:10PM (1 child)
Do you mean phonemes?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 10, @03:03PM
Yes, I should have looked up the spelling.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 09, @03:44PM
Wait, wait, wait, you wanted to actually do something while your computer played a sound file?!?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday January 08, @05:04PM
Back in the day, the Sound Blaster card was a phenomenal leap forward for audio. If you had one of those plus a Hercules graphics card for special text, you were quite set as far as the MS-DOS / DR-DOS world went. Of course the Amiga was the leader for multimedia, and the Macintosh for desktop publishing. The Hercules card's importance faded away quickly but the Sound Blaster stuck around at least long enough to ride the Doom wave [hothardware.com] IIRC.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday January 08, @06:13PM (1 child)
In the 1980s and 90s, Ensoniq [wikipedia.org] was well known as being a great innovator and front runner in the digital electronic musical instrument keyboard world. Ensoniq was an outgrowth of Commodore Computer, and MOS Technology, the company who designed and made the 6502 microprocessor and peripheral chips, like the very useful 6522, the great SID sound synthesizer [wikipedia.org], and others.
Since they had great knowledge of electronics, chip designs, and sound generation, they started their own line of PC sound cards: Ensoniq Soundscape [wikipedia.org]. Like early Sound Blasters, they had a CPU, RAM, ROM, sound generators, the ability to have sampled sounds (recordings of actual instruments) uploaded so they could be played. As such, it was a fairly large PC slot adapter card, and IIRC some had a "piggyback" board for additional RAM and ROM. Many considered the Soundscape to be even better than the Sound Blaster (more sounds, better sounding ones, more synths, etc.)
Sometime in the mid-90s they came up with the concept of putting much of the processing in the main PC's CPU, and called it the AudioPCI [wikipedia.org]. This allowed the hardware (now a PCI card) to be quite small and simple, and also allowed for much larger and easily installed / updated sampled and synthesized sounds (wavetables) to be loaded and played. IIRC, one of the main downsides was they were bound to Windows, but Linux drivers came along and worked well.
The PCI card quickly became standard OEM in HP, Gateway 2000, and some other PCs of that era (maybe Dell?). They soon were selling the chip to motherboards manufacturers and became quite standard on many motherboards for many years.
They had many patents, but they were following Commodore's business plan of imploding, so Creative bought them around 1997, as well as Cambridge Sound Works (mostly speakers), E-MU systems (rack-mounted synthesizers), and I forget maybe someone else.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Monday January 09, @02:57AM
Creative also bought E-Mu systems in 1993, which brought in technology that was used in the "SoundBlaster AWE 32". I think a PC I built around 1995 had one of those. And I still have an E-Mu Morpheus rack-mount digital synthesizer (also from 1993), but that must have been readily designed before the takeover. Creative probably were very impressed by prototypes when they closed the deal.