Long ago in a galaxy far far away, back in the early 90's, I worked for a crappy clone company as a phone technician. At the time, 386SX/25's were common for in-house technical support / customer service computers. Obviously our jobs did not require sound cards, or fancy hardware of any kind, but as technically savvy users, we spent a lot of time trying to sneak a good video card or more memory into our systems.
This question Was it possible to listen to music and work on old PCs got me to thinking about how we frequently solved the problem of not having a sound card.
As I remember it, there was some sort of driver we used to install that would play audio on the PC speaker. It was tinny and scratchy, but I remember it most definitely worked. What I can't remember is what the driver was called, or if it was a DOS thing or a Windows 3.x thing. It certainly worked well enough that Windows sounds were easily distinguishable.
Does anyone have any details for the audio driver I am referring to? I suspect there may be more than one, as it isn't a unique idea. I would be interested to know the name, how it was installed, if it supported DOS and/or Windows, and any other history that might be available.