alt Hacker NewsTell us about the great Sound Blaster shortage! I thought they threw one after you each time you left a PC parts shop. (Could be a different time period.) The GUS on the other hand...
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Lol, it was a shortage of money, not the cards!
This was in '93 or thereabouts and they were really expensive and through that very sparse where I was.
Honestly by 1995/1996 or so yeah you could find SoundBlaster cards everywhere and anywhere...but if you wanted a GUS you were basically having to plunk down a lot of cash.
Maybe SoundBlaster being short was a little earlier? I didn't have a PC before 1995, so...
By early 2000 you were seeing a lot of Ensoniq and other sort of "Windows Sound Source" crap in most consumer-grade PCs and if you wanted an AWE32 or AWE64 you had to specify you wanted a good sound card.
In Germany this was certainly true, as the local distributor CPS put out their own "Sound Blaster" cards for a while until stopped by a lawsuit. IIRC they were rebranded Aztech sound cards. I had a "Sound Blaster Junior" which I was quite fond of (until I saved some money for a GUS ACE).