Your daily dose of useless trivia

The Beatles' music is finally available on the iTunes store. I was kind of suprised at the announcement, actually, given the long, litigious history between Apple Computers and The Beatles' record label, also called Apple. In fact, you can still see a bit of that history on Macs today, if you look at the standard alert sounds (this is totally my favorite bit of Apple trivia, which is why I'm sharing it).

When Apple Computers started to ship their computers with microphones so people could record their own custom alert sounds (this was the early '90s, so this was very cutting edge), they were sued by Apple Records, the reasoning being that the fact that people could now record two second sounds on their computers meaning that Apple Computers was edging in on Apple Records' turf. As part of the fallout from this, the engineers at Apple were told that they had to rename some of the pre-loaded sounds from things like "chime" or "xylophone" to avoid any sort of musical connotation whatsoever. One of the sound designers, exasperated with this and other audio-related fallout from the lawsuit, wound up renaming one of his newly-created alert sounds to "Sosumi." Say it out loud to get the joke.

In fact, it's such a good joke that "Sosumi still comes as one of the preloaded alert sounds on Macs, long after "Quack" and "Simple Beep" have faded away.

Ironically, one of the other things Apple Records sued Apple Computers over? The iTunes store.