As any true Mac afficianado knows, the wild eep is the quintessential sound of the vintage Macintosh. The simple beep has been around longer, it is true, but it doesn't have the instant recognisability or the sheer cuteness of this singular eep.
From whence did the wild eep come? It can only be surmised that a bored Apple sound engineer, basking in the afterglow of sosumi, was playing with some audio hardware and suddenly:
Eeep!
That was the eep heard 'round the world. Steve Jobs heard it and just gave up on the whole NeXT thing. Russian "communism" collapsed even more. A Bulgarian child stopped crying. Every Mac with System 7 and OS 8 had it. It was crazy! hip! wild!, I tell you! Unfortunately, Apple cruelly cut its life short when OS 9 came out. Why? Some say that it's a plot by Nazi supporters hidden in Brazil to eliminate all sources of innocent joy in the world. Others say that, when played through Cher's favourite vocoder backwards, it caused people to spontaneously combust. Some really boring people say that Apple wanted to have a more professional image with their new operating system.
There is still hope, and you can help bring back the wild eep! Thanks to Google, anyone with 5 minutes to search for a Wild Eep sound can put this incredible creature into Mac OS X, OS 9, Linux, and Yes, Virginia, even Windows.