In 1990, during the development of the new Macintosh operating system software, System 7, Apple Computers was being sued by Beatles’ Apple Corps.
The two Apples had an agreement that stated that Apple Computer was prohibited from entering the music market and were again battling in court after the introduction of the Apple IIgs, which had MIDI capabilities. This meant that any new work on audio features was closely reviewed by Apple’s legal department.
One of the new features of System 7 was a new Sound Manager, which replaced the older APIs and, among other things allowed higher quality playback of audio.
One night Jim Reekes, the engineer who managed the develoment of audio on the Mac from 1990 to 1999 and, among other things*, created the startup chord, found out that one of the new system alert sounds he created** for System 7 was problematic. It was deemed “too musical” because of its name, Xylophone, and had to be renamed.
Reekes, appalled, initially joked that he would call it “Let it bleep”, a jab at both Apple Corps and Apple’s lawyers. When, after some laughter, it was made clear to the engineer that the pun would not be appropriate, Reekes quipped “so sue me”. After a brief reflection, with the help of Sheila Brady, the person in charge of the System 7 disks, Reekes resubmitted the sound’s name to the legal department as “sosumi”.
The two of them were very careful not to pronounce it and concocted some fake story that the word was Japanese, and meant “the absence of sound”.
Somehow the choice was approved and the (non) sound has been included in all subsequent versions of the System, Mac OS, and even Mac OS X. Moreso its story has become a beloved part of Apple folklore, to the point that the legal fine print for products on the www.apple.com website is currently marked with the CSS class name “sosumi”.
By the way, in 2007, the two Apples put an end to the ongoing trademark lawsuit entering an agreement under which Apple Inc. owns “all of the trademarks related to “Apple” and licenses “certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for their continued use”.
* Reekes also created the Mac and iPhone Camera/Screenshot Sound, which is actually a recording of an old Canon AE-1 from the late ’70s.
** According to some sources, the Xylophone/Sosumi sound was actually “borrowed” from a third party Macintosh video game, Crystal Quest.
Jim Reekes’s picture is from the BoingBoing website.
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