Fun Creative Labs fact: the reason soundcards were popular in the '90s was that while most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers, the instrument sounds were created with a very cheap version of a synthesis technique known as FM (for frequency modulation) synthesis. The first synthesizers (e.g. the Moog) used analog circuits known as oscillators to produce sounds in the form of sin waves, square waves, triangle waves etc. These were really not able to mimic the complex waveforms generated by real instruments, even when multiple oscillators were combined into one sound - and in those days adding oscillators just increased the cost of the circuitry in a linear fashion. FM synthesis essentially used one oscillator to modulate (aka change the frequency of) another waveform-generating oscillator, and this produced much more complex waveform output that could (sometimes, at least) mimic real-world instruments. So much more realistic sounds could be produced by just doubling the number of oscillators in the circuitry, instead of multiplying the oscillators by 10 or 100 or whatever and still not achieving very much sonically.
When it came time to build sound generators into PC chips, FM synthesis was the natural technique since the manufacturers still wanted it to be as cheap as humanly possible, even though the circuits were now digital instead of analog. And so was born a generation of shitty, tinny-sounding PCs. Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM. Wavetable synthesis stored an actual digitally-sampled sound bank of a real instrument for each of the defined MIDI instruments, with added loop points for instruments (like flute, strings etc.) that needed to be able to produce an arbitrarily long note. By today’s standards, the AWE32 sounded nearly as bad as the cheap FM stuff, but at the time it was fucking mind-blowing. It even had the capacity to load in your own instrument samples to replace the built-in ones, although this was a bit of a pain in the ass to do.
At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, and while it worked well, the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful and I had a lot of trouble convincing people it was a worthwhile endeavor (my parents were particularly prone to eye-rolling when listening to the chintzy notes). My first AWE32 improved things massively - the problem was that nobody out in the world had one so it was impossible to target it with my application. I dealt with the problem by essentially giving up until years later when PCs because powerful enough to do wavetable synthesis entirely in code using just the processor itself. And nowadays I can run the stuff on a first-generation iPhone!
I’m old enough to know that but I had virtually no interaction with computers until 1995 when I conceived the idea for my software (after reading Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker) and bought a PC and Visual Basic 3 to try and make it happen. I understand that Ataris and Amigas were pretty damn advanced for their time and I wonder what I could have done with them if I hadn’t been busy smoking dope and trying to be an Anthropologist.