Old Computers Resurrected As Instruments At Bletchley Park 109
arcticstoat writes with a snippet from bit-tech.com; musician Matthew Applegate "plans on assembling a virtual orchestra of 20 retired relics of computing at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The choice of venue will even allow Applegate to feature the infamous Colossus Mark 2 computer in the event, which was used for code-breaking in World War II and was recently reconstructed at Bletchley Park in 2007. ... A wide selection of computing fossils be used in Applegate's final musical presentation, which is called 'Obsolete?' This includes the Elliot 803 (a 1960s machine with 4KB of memory), the aforementioned Colossus Mark 2, a Bunsviga adding machine (pictured) and a punch card machine. As well as this, there are also some machines that will look nostalgically familiar to kids who grew up with the home computer generation, including a BBC Micro, an Atari 800XL, a Dragon 32 and an Amstrad CPC464." The article's list of the members of this "orchestra" makes an interesting checklist of computer hardware history.
Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers (Score:4, Interesting)
I highly recommend "The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers", by The User. You can find it on eMusic I think (probably elsewhere as well). It's like being in the computer lab of yore, but with style. :)
Re:Can they run Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
... and do they boot it faster than Vista on current PCs?
Speaking as a former Atari 800XL owner, no. In fact, it got to a point where you could memorize the exact pattern of beepbeeeepbeenbeepbeeeeenbeepbeepbebp..*drive rev.. drive rev*...*beep beeeeep been beeeeen beep...*... and have your own little internal count-down. And, on top of that, it booted into the app you were using. Wanna start another app? Turn off machine, insert new disk, turn it on and hold down the Option key.
In short: your quip was incredibly cheap and utterly unfunny to anybody who actually knows anything about the topic.
a dragon 32 :) ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I had one of those beasts, it was a british clone of the TRS-80 color computer.
6809, the 32k of ram was actually 64k and if you fiddled a bit with the memory controller you could copy the rom to ram and modify the code. Quite a nice little computer!
I wished someone would keep such a line of machines alive for kids today to learn how to code on. There is absolutely no way you're going to completely 'grok' that machine on your desktop, one of these small machines you actually stand a chance.
Best school I ever had...
Re:Infamous? (Score:3, Interesting)
Possibly the submitter is German.
No, if the submitter was German, he would be complaining about the lack of recognition for Konrad Zuse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse.
And no, I had never heard of him either, until I visited Germany.
Sinclair Machines (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm more surprised there are no Sinclair machines in the orchestra (ZX81, ZX Spectrum) since they were what drove the home computer revolution of the early 80s in the UK.
The ZX81 was incredibly primitive in order to get its price below £100. I think it was the first ever computer you could buy for under £100. It had no colour and no sound, 1k of RAM in its base configuration and 8k of ROM that managed to include some very useful floating-point maths!
There was a hack you could do to in machine code get sound out of it. The cassette interface, for loading and saving programs to tape, made its way to the TV set. It was a bit in an IO register. The CPU was responsible for the TV display, so the screen went funny black and white patterns when it was doing tape IO. Usually you had the TV sound turned off. You could write precise timing loops in machine code to toggle the bit and to generate musical notes.
There was a ZX80/81 machine code book by Toni Baker which had a program to do this. You could play the ZX81 like a piano. The program was only a few hundred bytes long.
The Spectrum took this idea a bit further. The screen was generated by the ULA, so the processor could do sound and tape IO without harming the display. Sound was a single channel through a tiny build in loud-speaker which was modulated using a single bit of an IO register... very similar to tape IO :-)
The Spectrum 128 which came out years later, had an AY-3-8192 3-channel sound chip in addition to the beeper :-)
Oblig. Sam and Max (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Internally there were a number of option rom sockets, which with some trickery could be used for a ram expansion (bank switched 16 k windows).
I designed and built an expansion board for these 12 additional (4 on the motherboard) bank switched ROMs. I sold 100 of those (as a kit) in Holland. Must have been 1983/84. I still have one of these lying on the desk in my basement. :-) Sweet memories....
Re:Awesome (Score:2, Interesting)
Damn, that'll teach me not to throw out obsolete stuff. I wrote a simple piece of music software for my Amstrad CPC464 back in the mid-eighties. It took input from the keyboard (using shift/ctrl for sharp and flat, if I recall), displayed musical notation on screen and played it through the primitive sound chip.
I eventually got it to play one of Bach's 48 (preludes & fugues). I seem to recall that it had 4 channels, so could cope with the 4-part counterpoint pretty well. The sound chip was horrible, but if you specified a rapidly decaying envelope it could sound very roughly like a plunckety-plunk "harpsichord".
All gone now: It was stored on one of Alan Sugar's ridiculous 3 inch disks (not 3 1/2 or 5 1/4, and entirely proprietary to his toy computers).