Macseum Stories · No. 3 · 5 min read
The Sound of Startup
A tritone, an arpeggio, and one perfect C-major chord: how the Mac's boot sound became the most famous three seconds in computing.
Every vintage Mac in this museum announces itself the same way: you flip the switch, the CRT crackles with static, and the machine plays you a note. Not an error beep — a greeting. The startup sound is one of the oldest continuous traditions in personal computing, and its evolution tells Apple's whole story in miniature: from a diagnostic beep to a designed emotion.
1984: the beep with a job
The original Macintosh's startup sound was a simple square-wave beep — engineer Andy Hertzfeld's doing — and its job was diagnostic: if you heard it, the hardware had passed its self-test. The Mac also gave the beep a dark twin: the 'Chimes of Death,' a somber arpeggio played when hardware failed, accompanied by the Sad Mac icon. From the very beginning, the Mac communicated its health in music.
Through the late eighties the boot sound evolved gently — the Mac II played a cleaner chord built from a major third, richer hardware allowing richer greetings. But the sound was still furniture. The transformation into an icon took a jazz musician with a day job.
1991: the chord that stuck
Sound designer Jim Reekes, tired of the existing chimes (and, by his own telling, tired of much at Apple), created a new startup sound for the Quadra line: a huge, shimmering C-major chord, played on a Korg synthesizer, drenched in reverb — deliberately 'palate-cleansing,' designed to defuse the small anxiety of wondering whether your computer would boot. Legend and Reekes agree on the inspiration for its character: something Zen, universal, and impossible to date.
Reekes had to smuggle it past management, who were content with the old sounds; he named the file in ways that dodged review, and by the time anyone senior noticed, users loved it. The chord spread across the product line through the nineties, deepening on the Power Macs (the famous PowerBook 6100-era chime) until 1998, when the iMac G3 shipped with a refined version — and that exact sound, essentially unchanged, is the chime Macs still play today.
One more Reekes credit, since we're here: he also created the camera-shutter sound your iPhone makes. Some people get one immortal sound; he got two.
The silence and the encore
In 2016 Apple quietly shipped MacBook Pros that booted silently — the chime was gone, a casualty of always-on, lid-open-and-it's-awake computing. The obituaries were genuinely mournful; no other company's POST sequence has ever been grieved. Then in 2020, with Apple Silicon and macOS Big Sur, the chime returned as a settings option and a default — Apple had learned that the sound was not furniture after all, but heritage.
Stand in front of our SE/30 and switch it on. The 'bong' that follows is thirty-five years of continuity in a single chord — the only sound in computing that works like a church bell: you don't hear it so much as recognize it.