We used to write code to play tunes on drum printers - nice and loud

The most hard core lady from HP product group that I ever met when working 
there, could walk up to one of our green screen terminals and, from memory, 
enter enough machine code to make it play a car game. She'd spent way too much 
time in Terminals Division.

Regards

Greg

Dr Greg Low
SQL Down Under
+61 419201410
1300SQLSQL (1300775775)

On 23 Jan 2016, at 7:45 PM, Greg Keogh 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

I do not think it would be as valid today with much faster clock speeds.

Oh yeah, processors are so fast now, that only a dog would be able to hear the 
supersonic squeals of the boot sequence.

But seriously, I have a 1982 vintage Sansui G-3500 tuner-amplifier on my desk, 
and when I have the volume way up I can hear the squawking from my work PC as 
it does intensive work like saving an mp3 file or doing bulk batch builds. I've 
never tried to correlate the sounds to the workload, but I'm sure it's an art 
form waiting to be discovered.

In 1977 I was told by a Honeywell engineer that one of his colleagues wrote an 
assembler program on punch cards that could be IPLd (booted) and would play a 
sequence of musical notes by moving multiple tape drive heads back and forth at 
certain speeds. In never saw it, but I never doubted it was true.

GK

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