Bill Hitefield wrote on 11/30/2022 10:39 AM:
In college we had an IBM 1130 in the computer lab. Those of us working in the lab discovered an AM radio placed near
the console switches made odd noises when you ran Fortran programs and set the radio to a specific "station".
Further investigation revealed you could change the tone of the noise by using the "e to the x" function and
varying the value of "x". Our goal in life then became to play "Smoke on the Water" using that
radio. The temp wasn't too great, but you could recognize the main riff!
Bill Hitefield
Dino-Software Corporation
800.480.DINO
www.dino-software.com
I don't remember it very well, but I think the same could be done to
some extent on some 360 models.
In the mid-1970s, a college friend had a job as an off-hours computer
operator at RAND (amusingly, where that 1970 film was made). He
wrote, and a musical friend tuned, a program which played music on a
2400 series tape drive by writing various length blocks -- the shorter
the repeated block, the higher the note. I think one of their 2 songs
was Puff the Magic Dragon. It was just hilarious to hear recognizable
music from a tape drive. The program wore out tapes pretty quickly
though because all those short blocks were tough on the tape. One
long channel program IIRC to keep the music from pausing when a
different job was dispatched.
Footnote: That computer center had MVS 3.0 running in the mid 1970s.
It was the first time that I saw MVS with lots of new stuff compared
to MVT 21. But no TSO -- they ran Wylbur.
/Leonard
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