[kipman725]

I have a working AWE64 with ram upgrades... it's a very very good card and for just listening to wave/mp3 is slays most on-board offerings of today. As a midi card it's also quite competent (although not so good for strings). Huge thing though.. had to stop using in my main system due to lack of ISA.

 

[Aevum]

my soundblaster 2.0 was retiered long ago,

 

[maladjustdeath]

Before soundcards there was the pc speaker (the one initially designed to beep). I think it was the help of some cheat code on Peter Norton x86 assembly book (or boot directly into BASIC from bios) that allowed one to program the speaker to produce various pitches of different lengths and thus hear music.
I think that various demos (First karateka, later an animated song about mushrooms (???) ) started utilizing this same speaker into more sophisticated synthesized speech and music.

 

[BradJudy]

I have an original 8-bit Soundblaster ISA card in my computer "antique" box here at work.

That AdLib posted is classic - I haven't thought about those in a long time.