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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if I should make a joke menubar program where every time you make a newline while typing it sounds a slide-ding noise! I might do that…

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The "ding" is a bell that is mechanically activated when the carriage gets close to the end of the writeable area (in many typewriters, this is a moveable stop to account for variable paper width).

So when one types, the bell alerts the typist to the need to return the carriage; typically you get quite a few characters after the bell, either to finish your word, or hyphenate.

Which makes it ding-slide rather than slide-ding :)

This was also an option on many "Glass TTY" terminals - it was called the margin bell - and even some modern terminal emulators still have that option. The exact semantics vary, but it's usually triggered when entering content around 8 characters from the right margin.

Hahaha, good point, you know I knew that but just didn’t think it through. I’d still like to make it though…

As far as I remember it, the bell works on both sides, so you get ding, type..., slide-ding.

I remember back in the early 90's installing an extension on every Mac in the school computer lab that made typewriter sounds on every keypress, including that "zzzzzzipDING!" sound when hitting return (or was it "DINGzzzzip"?)

It was hilarious for a few minutes, then got old really quick, so it didn't last the day. The Oscar extension stuck around for months though ("I love it because it's trash!"). Computers were just so much fun back then...

Haha true, but they can be fun now too, nothing stopping us writing applications just for whimsy!

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