In the early 80's, I worked on my first PDP-11/44 with RSTS, initially
as a programmer. The system manager had a few DECtape reels that could
play music when loaded and sped forward. The Dutch national anthem was
one of the hits. This was a military research facility, and every time
some high-ranking officer visited the site, he was shown why all this
money was paid for a computer system.
/Wilm
J. David Bryan schreef op 13-2-2016 om 06:08:
On Friday, February 12, 2016 at 18:09, Bob Supnik wrote:
When Applied Data Research got its PDP-7 in 1966, there was a DECUS
program to get it to play music by toggling the lower order 4 bits of
the MQ (and the MQ lights) to generate square waves. If you wired that
up to an audio player, you got electronic "music" of a blatting sort,
in four part harmony.
At the HP office in Rockville, MD in 1975, they had a small program that
played music on an HP 2748 paper tape reader, which was a 500 cps optical
unit that could stop and start on each byte. It utilized a solenoid-
actuated brake that was driven by the control flip-flop on the interface
card. Set the control FF, and the brake would release for reading. Clear
the FF, and the brake would energize and pinch the tape to stop it.
So with the program loaded, you'd fold a foot-long piece of scrap tape in
half and tuck it under the brake anvil to act as a sounding board. When
you ran the program, it'd play a short ditty by pulsing the brake at
various frequencies.
...it sounded utterly bizarre, but... the computer was playing music!
Quite so. The HP SEs didn't like to show the program more than once per
customer, as they said it put a month's worth of wear on the reader in
thirty seconds.
-- Dave
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