[Simh] Sounds

[Johnny Billquist]

The PDP-8 did as well. Actually, with the PDP-8, the normal way was to 
tune in somewhere on the AM band, and have the radio close to the 
machine, and you'd get 4 part harmonies....
I might still have a tape with recordings somewhere. But I'm sure there 
are examples on YouTube as well.

And MUSIC.SV is definitely available, as is a number of files with 
various scrores people put it.

Quite a nifty program, the PDP-8 one was.

	Johnny

On 2016-02-13 00:23, Timothe Litt wrote:
> There is a DECUS program for the -10 that also did music.
>
> Before the FCC mandated shielding c.a. 1990, your could also get sound
> effects from the RF emissions.
>
> I predict that SimH isn't going to emulate any of that.
>
> The -10 also supported 1,200 CPM card readers.  The amazing thing is
> that in a machine room where the fans, AC, motors & printers were
> deafening, you REALLY noticed the extra noise when the card reader
> started.  I wore hearing protectors...
>
> On 12-Feb-16 18:09, Bob Supnik wrote:
>> And then there was early computer music...
>>
>> 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. (It really needed some analog filtering to
>> flatten the square waves into curves, but that was beyond me.) Anyway,
>> I spent much of my free time that summer programming as much of the
>> original piano score of "Pictures at an Exhibition" as would fit into
>> four parts. With the buzzing tones, the completely constant volume,
>> and the coarse controls over note lengths, it sounded utterly bizarre,
>> but... the computer was playing music! As was said back then, "The
>> marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at
>> all."
>>
>> The PDP-7 had DECtapes, and they had their own unique rhythms. DEC's
>> software was poorly written and could only read a block at a time, so
>> you'd hear the tape start, reverse, read, stop; rinse and repeat. A
>> brilliant colleague named Avram Caspy figured out how to insert
>> optimized routines underneath DEC's software (he used all 8KW extended
>> memory as a buffer). With his routines, the DECtapes would start,
>> reverse, and then whoosh at high speed for up to 30 blocks before
>> stopping. DEC's paper tape routines were equally poor and would
>> stutter-read; use of interrupts and a short circular buffer made that
>> continuous and quieter as well.
>>
>> Another fun set of devices were the very high-speed vacuum pick card
>> readers that the mainframe companies made. They would blow air through
>> the card deck to separate the cards and then vacuum pick the top card,
>> reading and expelling it at breakneck speed (the best readers did 1000
>> cards per minute or more). Of course, when they broke, you got a
>> totally different sound, as cards were blown all over the machine
>> room, typically with the front-edges curled, making them unreadable.
>>
>> /Bob
>>
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-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol