Why do computers beep? What causes the noise, and what made beeps the universal sound of computer?

Question

They’re everywhere, seeming since the advent of electronics beeps have been used. Why?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Characteristically, a beep is a single tone that has a simplistic waveform, usually a sine wave or square wave. These types of audio signals are really easy to generate with super super basic hardware (think 1 or may be 2 transistors max, plus a few resistors and a capacitor) and so they’ve been used for decades in electronics, for signalling things like errors (a beep is hard to ignore) or things like button presses.