My girlfriend had a fond childhood memory of solving the old Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade PC adventure game together with her parents. I thought, what better way to surprise her -- and get her back into gaming -- than to dig up that ol' game and get it running on our home computer? Of course, PC games that old are hard to buy and even harder to get running. So it was going to take a little research.

Naturally I started poking around at work. Now, this was dangerous, because I'd already been busted twice last week for playing Civ III and was already written up. But what could go wrong? I was just surfing a few abandonware sites and trying to find a place to get old DOS games.

At last I had a file on my hard drive and a DOS window ready to go. This is a delicate art. I hadn't tried these old games in years but I remembered that sometimes there was a speed problem if you tried to run an old game on a new computer. But caution was the word of the day! I couldn't afford to get caught. I peeked over the cubicle walls to make sure nobody was coming, then slouched down in my seat, turned my speakers off, and run the program.

The installer was done all in text. Quaint. Finally ... the intro screen appeared! It was working! And then it happened. Somewhere in my cubicle I heard a short mechanical beep, followed in succession by more beeps of varying pitches, then a loooong drawn out screech. These weren't tiny little watch beeps, neither. These were LOUD, loud enough to rattle the pencils on my desk. People started coming over. A crowd formed at my cubicle entrance while I futilely pounded the escape key. I yanked the cord from my speakers but the beeping didn't stop ... I realized, with both horror and fascination, that my CPU tower itself was the source of the noise. My PC speaker, heretofore heard only once as that little beep on boot-up, was now screaming a cacophony that would make John Williams weep. The crowd surged around:

"What is that?"
"That's his computer."
"His computer is beeping."
"Wait ... it's playing ... it's making music!"
"It's playing Indiana Jones ... from the PC Speaker!"
"I didn't know those things could make noise."
"You mean games used to use THAT for music?"

The crowd of us ogled the beeping box in morbid fascination. Then I got fired.