People underestimate the fun sounds that a classic PC speaker could produce.
There were 3 settable counters for timing so you could produce some fairly complex “wave forms”. You could lower the volume of a tone by making the pulse width short. One timer could be used to modulate the sound produced by another. All sorts of neat tricks. You were practically in PCM territory.
I played back Simpsons audio samples, simple music (Ode to Joy is always popular), and there even was a basic speech synthesizer. You typed in the phonetic sounds and out came speech! Amazing.
One fun little one was Squawk from 1987. Hit a key, get one of many weird sounds. You can still download and run it, but unfortunately a modern OS will divert the “sound” to standard audio out, and do a terrible job at it.
The Wikipedia article has more plus a recording of a little Bach music.
(I tracked down Squawk on my computer in a folder of old games. There goes the rest of the afternoon. :))
Around the time I first got online in 1996, I remember downloading Oasis b-sides, 200 or 300k files with shockingly bad audio quality. Sounded like they were being played through a fish tank. A year or so later I was ripping friends’ and family cds and forming a decent enough collection, then MP3 became really big a year or so after that, Napster etc. I had piles of CD-rs with MP3s on them at one stage. I believe I still have a number of audio files that I can listen to on my bog standard laptop now that date from 1998/99.
The first person I personally knew, who was curating a music collection, was in 2000. She was using our 128K ISDN connection, and saving to our server That was a thing too.
Sys Admin blocked Napster, because the additional data costs were killing us.
That was a thing too.