Looking for references to playing fightsongs on computers 4307
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The mechanisms by which this was done vary. The example with which I am most familiar, relates to the Danish GIER computer from about 1960. In the GIER, the overflow bit of the main accumulator was wired to a speaker in the console desk. At some point the company that manufactured the computer sent out a program to play "Jesu bleibe meine Freude" (Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring) by JS Bach as Christmas greeting. Shortly after that, someone produced a music compiler to produce such "recordings".
Some of us in high school in Southern California were doing this in the spring of 1968 plus 1, with an hp9100a programmable that people were doing this with...
I was glancing at a book I had, "Introduction to Data Processing", based on an internal IBM course about computers. I noticed the observation that FORTRAN II was introduced in 1958, shortly after the...
I was first introduced to this in 1970. A few months later, I visited an IBM 1401 installation, where they had music programs using different means of tone generation (since the 1401 did not have a speaker): - using the 1403 line printer and the tape drives as noise generators - using electromagnetic noise from the core memory (picked up on an AM radio atop the CPU cabinet)
The GIER was much nicer to listen to!!
The console speaker was very useful to follow the progress of a program, as it moved through its phases. I spent some time as a night-shift operator in the physics department of Copenhagen University, and the recurring modeling programs had their phases, as they went through - input and setup - iterations of a model - generation of a plotter command file for 3-D visualization of the model data
When a program got stuck in the iteration loop, the operator knew it, and could provide information to the physicist owner in the run report after killing the program.
Lars Poulsen