The year is 1981. Your IBM PC is equipped with a tragic speaker that sounds awful for anything except occasional beeps. (Those beeps sound awful, too.)

You can’t afford a sound card and besides, sound cards for your PC have not been invented yet. You can’t even afford a floppy drive, so you’re one of the rare people who actually uses an audio cassette player as a storage device – a technique usually reserved for more primitive machines that have half the bits your new PC does.

But there’s a silver lining. Your cassette player has a little relay that controls its motor. You can engage and disengage the relay at will.

So, someone figured out that toggling the relay kind of sounds like a metronome. Like percussion. It’s a hack, but in the sonic landscape inhabited solely by your sorry speaker, it’s a breath of fresh air (scroll to 7:26 if you don’t land there automatically):

The year is 2026. Your computer itself is the size of an audio cassette, fits in your pocket, has better storage, graphics, sound, pretty much everything compared to a 1981 PC. It even has a special haptic motor. Except, that motor can only be controlled by native apps, and there is no official API to do it from a browser.

But there’s a silver lining. Tapping any checkbox on a site generates a haptic pulse. And that apparently works even if the checkbox is hidden and if the computer is doing the tapping.

So, someone figured out a way to use that to build a library that gives websites powers to provide haptic feedback. It’s a hack, but damn if it’s not one someone took to its logical conclusion.

I love these kinds of hacks, and I wonder what’s going to happen to this one. Will it fly under a radar, or will some websites start abusing it? If so, will Safari clamp it down, or will it actually give people a proper API for haptics?