[Simh] Sounds

[Wilm Boerhout]

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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