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I have a memory of my dad's old Macintosh playing a custom sound every hour. It was his a capella rendition of the Westminster Quarters.
This was decades ago and my memory could be faulty. Was this feasible on a Mac made circa 1985-95? If so, was this a publicized feature or just something he did himself?
The Mac had the necessary soft- and hardware to play arbitrary sounds. It is said that the 8 bit/22 kHz DAC hardware was included on Steve Jobs' request especially for his "out of this bag" stunt, although Andy Herzfelds recollection tells this being exaggerated, but showing his dedication to the sound system.
Sound files were first class resources, supported by Toolbox(MacOS) calls right from the start, making it a much used feature right from the start. This included as well improved alarm clocks offering a hourly chime.
As so often Apple included successful features into the OS. I can't find the exact point quarter hourly chimes were first introduces as part of the OS, but by OS 8 (1997) the Clock Settings panel featured a section to assign arbitrary sounds to be played at :15, :30, :45 and full hour, titled Chime Settings.
Any installed sound could be used - including the quite popular
Westminster Chimes System Clock Sounds by Clixsounds of 1998
By OS 9 the dialog peaked:
In fact, when Apple dropped that feature in favour of a call out by speech synthesis in OSX, many users were rather disappointed, wanting their soundfiles back.
For awhile in the 1990s, I had SoundMaster installed on my Macintosh, and configured to play some sound files I'd synthesized every 15 minutes. I had to disable it when I needed as much memory as possible, and after while I stopped re-enabling it, but programs such as you describe definitely existed.
One difficulty with such programs is that such sounds may be triggered at times when it would not be safe to request disk access(*), and thus any sounds they may wish to play would have to be kept loaded at all times. On a system with four megabytes of RAM, the memory cost may exceed the coolness factor. Still, such programs did exist and at least some people actually used them.
(*) In order to accommodate rather tight memory constraints, the MacOS is designed around the idea that applications will generally allocate relocatble chunks of storage identified by handles. A program may read the address of storage identified by a handle, and assume the address won't change unless some operation is performed that would access memory. Because an attempt to access a disk may cause the system to pop up a dialog box, which would in turn require allocating storage for associated data structures, disk operations were included as being among those that might access storage (and potentially cause the addresses associated with handles to change). Doing this at a time when an application is relying upon a pointer to storage remaining valid would be disastrous.
Although the MacOS did include a function to lock the storage associated with a handle, reading and using the handle pointer without locking was common and accepted practice in situations where there would be no intervening operations that might allocate storage.
If it was 1985, it had to be an original Mac, or maybe a Mac Plus or SE slightly after.
Those devices did have sample playback capability -- 8 bits, 22 kHz -- and a built-in speaker.
They did not have multi-tasking (until the Multi-Finder in some later system version,) BUT they had an interesting hot-patching strategy, where the OS would load extensions (called INITs) as it started up, and those extensions could hook into almost any part of the system.
There were INITs to make the trash can play a Grinch animation when emptying it. There were INITs to make the computer play clacky sounds when typing on the keyboard. There were INITs to help debug software, to play pranks, to look up documentation files, to connect to networks, and do a number of other things.
So, was there an INIT that played a sound every hour? I can't recall one, but I'm pretty sure one must have existed, because it wouldn't have been very hard to create, and an hourly "chime" sounds like something people would want.
I have a dim memory about SuperClock by Steve Christensen being able to play sound (resources) from the System file depending on the clock.
On my old Macs you simply could set the computer to tell the time up to every quarter of the hour. It was also possible to choose and even record the sound. I recorded different singing bowls for the whole, half, first and last quarters and that was really nice. Apple foolishly removed this option somewhere - during the nineties. Since there has been no free and problem free app for this simple feature which makes it possible to not laboriously have to set your alarm clock. The Tibetan singing bowls sounded even more great than a grandfather clock does. It would be nice to get this back in every version of OS that's still working. It seems such a simple gesture that gives so much.
