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A beep is a short, single tone, typically high-pitched, generally made by a computer or any other electronic device. The term has its origin in onomatopoeia. The word "beep-beep" is recorded for the noise of a car horn in 1929, and the modern usage of "beep" for a high-pitched tone is attributed to Arthur C. Clarke in 1951. [1]
In some computer terminals, the ASCII character code 7, bell character, outputs an audible beep. The beep is also sometimes used to notify the user when the BIOS is not working or there is some other error during the start up process, often during the power-on self-test (POST). [2] A beep is also made when holding down too many keys at the same time, as the computer often cannot handle the processes.
| Developer(s) | Various open-source and commercial developers |
|---|---|
| Operating system | ReactOS, PTS-DOS, SISNE plus, AROS, MSX-DOS |
| Type | Command |
The command-line interfaces of the ReactOS, PTS-DOS, [3] SISNE plus, [4] and AROS [5] operating systems include a beep command. A beep command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2. [6]
Beeps are also used as a warning when a truck, lorry or bus is reversing. It can also be used to define the sound produced by a car horn. Colloquially, beep is also used to refer to the action of honking the car horn at someone, (e.g., "Why did that guy beep at me?"), and is more likely to be used with vehicles with higher-pitched horns. "Honk" is used if the sound is lower pitched (e.g. Volkswagen Beetles beep, but Oldsmobiles honk.[ citation needed ] On trains, beeps may be used for communications between members of staff. [1]
A beep is also a colloquialism for a zip tone to indicate a telephone call coming in on the same phone line as someone is currently speaking, either on a landline or mobile phone. The call waiting feature often outputs an audible "beep" noise to indicate that there is a second call coming in.
The electronic pager is often referred to as a "beeper" for the sound it emits to alert its owner to an incoming message.
As a noun, the practice of "beeping" in sub-Saharan Africa refers to the cell phone phenomenon during which a person dials a number but immediately cancels the call before it is answered in order to elicit a call back from the recipient. One reason for this practice is to elicit a recipient to call back when the caller has almost run out of prepaid units for his/her cell phone but still wants or needs to talk to the recipient. In Rwanda, this practice has evolved into an art for courting between men and women, where women "beep" males in order to elicit a call back, which manifests the man's interest and willingness to pay for the woman's call. At times, this practice can be an inconvenience for the recipient, and at times, people ignore the "beeps." "Beeping" is also known as "flashing" in sub Saharan Africa, and is known as "menacing" or "fishing" in Indonesia. [7]
The use of profanity and offensive language on free-to-air broadcasts in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Japan is sometimes censored by replacing the profane word or phrase with an audible beep(s), often accompanied by obscuring the speaker's mouth to prevent lip-reading. If there is a closed captioning, the word is commonly replaced by asterisks, used as a mixture of letters and asterisks, or "[bleep]" is used.
uniq is a utility command on Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems which, when fed a text file or standard input, outputs the text with adjacent identical lines collapsed to one, unique line of text.
MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by ASCII Corporation on June 16, 1983. It was initially conceived by Microsoft as a product for the Eastern sector, and jointly marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, the director at ASCII Corporation. Microsoft and Nishi conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period, in the same fashion as the VHS standard for home video tape machines. The first MSX computer sold to the public was a Mitsubishi ML-8000, released on October 21, 1983, thus marking its official release date.
In computing, ls is a command to list computer files and directories in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is specified by POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification.
A ringtone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming telephone call. Originally referring to the sound of electromechanical striking of bells or gongs, the term refers to any sound by any device alerting of an incoming call.
Call waiting is a telephone service where a subscriber can accept a second incoming telephone call by placing an in-progress call on hold—and may also switch between calls. With some providers it can be combined with additional features such as conferencing, call forwarding, and caller ID. Call waiting is intended to alleviate the need to have more than one telephone line or number for voice communications.
The computer tool patch is a Unix program that updates text files according to instructions contained in a separate file, called a patch file. The patch file is a text file that consists of a list of differences and is produced by running the related diff program with the original and updated file as arguments. Updating files with patch is often referred to as applying the patch or simply patching the files.
A PC speaker is a loudspeaker built into some IBM PC compatible computers. The first IBM Personal Computer, model 5150, employed a standard 2.25 inch magnetic driven (dynamic) speaker. More recent computers use a tiny moving-iron or piezo speaker instead. The speaker allows software and firmware to provide auditory feedback to a user, such as to report a hardware fault. A PC speaker generates waveforms using the programmable interval timer, an Intel 8253 or 8254 chip.
tr is a command in Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems. It is an abbreviation of translate or transliterate, indicating its operation of replacing or removing specific characters in its input data set.
wc is a command in Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and Unix-like operating systems. The program reads either standard input or a list of computer files and generates one or more of the following statistics: newline count, word count, and byte count. If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.
An output device is any piece of computer hardware that converts information/DATA into a human-perceptible form or, historically, into a physical machine-readable form for use with other non-computerized equipment. It can be text, graphics, tactile, audio, or video. Examples include monitors, printers, speakers, headphones, projectors, GPS devices, optical mark readers, and braille readers.
In computing, more is a command to view the contents of a text file one screen at a time. It is available on Unix and Unix-like systems, DOS, Digital Research FlexOS, IBM/Toshiba 4690 OS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows and ReactOS. Programs of this sort are called pagers. more is a very basic pager, originally allowing only forward navigation through a file, though newer implementations do allow for limited backward movement.
tail is a program available on Unix, Unix-like systems, FreeDOS and MSX-DOS used to display the tail end of a text file or piped data.
The dump command is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to back up file systems. It operates on blocks, below filesystem abstractions such as files and directories. Dump can back up a file system to a tape or another disk. It is often used across a network by piping its output through bzip2 then SSH.
In computing, sleep is a command in Unix, Unix-like and other operating systems that suspends program execution for a specified time.
The reorder tone, also known as the fast busy tone, or the congestion tone, or all trunks busy (ATB) tone is an audible call progress tone in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) that is returned to a calling party to indicate that the call cannot be processed through the network.
MSX-DOS is a discontinued disk operating system developed by Microsoft for the 8-bit home computer standard MSX, and is a cross between MS-DOS v1.25 and CP/M-80 v2.2.
The Motorola Minitor is a portable, analog, receive only, voice pager typically carried by fire, rescue, and EMS personnel to alert of emergencies. The Minitor, slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes, is carried on a person and usually left in selective call mode. When the unit is activated, the pager sounds a tone alert, followed by an announcement from a dispatcher alerting the user of a situation. After activation, the pager remains in monitor mode much like a scanner, and monitors transmissions on that channel until the unit is reset back into selective call mode either manually, or automatically after a set period of time, depending on programming.
SISNE plus is a DOS 3.3 compatible clone created by Itautec and Scopus Tecnologia in Brazil prior to the end of the Market Reserve in 1991, which, at that time, forbade the importation of electronic equipment and software for general use. The system was sold with PC/XT compatible Itautec IS 30 computers and with Itautec IS 386 computers. With the widespread use of MS-DOS after the importations were allowed, the SISNE plus operating system was discontinued.
Music Macro Language (MML) is a music description language used in sequencing music on computer and video game systems.
In computing, the print command provides single-user print spooling capability in a number of operating systems. It is roughly similar to that provided by the UNIX System V lp and BSD lpr print spooler systems.
