Hackaday

IBM's Mwave sound card from the 1990s was a commercial failure despite innovative DSP technology. Unlike competitors who cloned the dominant SoundBlaster 16, IBM used their own Mwave DSP chip to power both audio and an integrated dial-up modem. The card suffered from notoriously flaky drivers and poor performance when using sound and modem simultaneously. IBM's decision to hide problems behind NDAs rather than improve drivers sealed its fate. The chipset appeared in ThinkPads but was never sold in Europe, contributing to its obscurity in computing history.

IBM Made A Sound Card? Who Knew!