AFAICT, Kid Pix was first released as public domain in 1989, and published a year or two later by Broderbund. We don't think much about it these days when buyi

AFAICT, Kid Pix was first released as public domain in 1989, and published a year or two later by Broderbund. We don't think much about it these days when buying and using a quarter-terabyte MicroSD card is rather passe, and when we can buy a complete USB sound card for ~$5 at Wal-Mart (we call it a "USB C headphone adapter" and it acts just like we'd expect a dumb adapter to act, but it's got the whole works integrated completely inside of the connector shell -- ADC, DAC, power amp, ...). Back then, audio was... problematic. It was unwieldy. At 16-bit stereo 44.1KHz ("CD quality"), a 5.25" double-density disk can hold less than two seconds of audio, and we didn't have the computational grunt for perceptive codecs like MP3. So we just used less of it: We sampled with fewer bits, and we did so less-often. A combination of low sample rate and primitive ADC implementations with not-so-good Nyquist filtering and other issues lead to both a chopped off top end, and a mess of sampling artifacts in an easily-audible range. A low sample depth lead to analog sounds being recorded as hot as possible -- often with deliberate clipping -- lest there be even fewer bits to contain the important parts of the sounds. Some of this could be mitigated with high-quality dynamic range compression, but good outboard compressors were expensive (and so were the 16-bit workflows that would allow that to be done digitally in software). It was a sea of tradeoffs. Further digital processing also had a bad effect on stuff (quantization errors, oh my!) -- somewhat akin to doing things like trying to scale the resolution of ASCII art. And even then, sometimes the audio was too big. So we'd truncate samples by just chopping off LSBs until the sounds were barely-useful even in a chonky fun drawing program (the original disksets from the SoundBlaster card came with "compression" software that did exactly this), just to make things a wee bit smaller because storage was relatively tiny. This was how we got the sounds of the early-ish days of PCM audio on home computers, and much of that carried on into the early flash days (due to bandwidth constraints, not so much storage; CD-ROMs had broadly fixed the storage problem for commercially-published software by then).