> > when I was a computing neophyte, a
> >quarter of a century ago, I was told a story by an engineer working
> >for a major mainframe supplier. For a laugh, the development team
> >wired up a loudspeaker (presumably through a buffer and amplifier of
> >some sort) to one of the bits in a CPU shift register. (This was
> >easily done in the days when everything was discrete components!)
> >The trick was then to code your program so that it performed to
> >specification, but, by insertion of extra instructions to tweak this
> >particular bit at suitable times, played interesting tunes whilst
> >doing so!
>
> Alex Hurwitz loves this story. They did just that on the SWAC. It
> was captured for prosperity in the film 'Magnetic Monster'. I once
> made some MPegs and put them on the wwweb. I wonder if they are
> still there? Alex says the sounds in the movie were produced by LL
> tests.
geez, in the early 70's when I was larnin' proggin', it was S.O.P. to keep a
AM radio on top of the mainframe tuned between stations... you could get a
REAL good idea exactly what the system was doing by the sounds it made on
one of that vintage of multiprocessing batch machines. If it settled down
on a steady warble, it was almost for sure cuz some student had looped his
job, and it was time to get over to the console, find out who was hung and
manually abort them.
-jrp
_________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
