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...for a long time? What about street organs? And what about instruments like the Hupfeld Phonoliszt Violina Orchestrion? This apparatus uses some mechanism to play violins. And that is almost 100 years old and was at that time regarded as the 7th World Wonder.

I think that's nitrous oxide you smell.

Maurkov

The alert (hope it isn't /.ed into nothingness)

Please tell everybody you know!!!

If you think fried or baked carbohydrates are a danger check out the bad news about dihydrogen oxide!

Goddammit, the USA had declared folk music illegal. Isn't that sick?

To answer your question, if something becomes so popular that it's part of the national culture- be it a catch phrase, song, picture, movie, cartoon characters, etc., then the public owns it. Sure, the author/publisher deserves a some profit for it for a little while, perhaps a single lifetime. But dammit, the world owns Mickey Mouse by now, just as much as it owns Ichabod Crane, Merlin, or Oedipus.

From "Mechanical Music Digest(tm) Archives":
http://www.foxtai l.com/Archives/Digests/199812/1998.12.15.09.html

I heard that some joker put a print file in the hopper which contained the image of the print chain. When _all_ the hammers struck the chain at the same instant it dislodged from its drive wheels and flew through the plastic window of the machine. The repairman muttered, "I've seen this problem before. Wonder what causes it?" Even then there were "viruses" running around to wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting. -- Robbie

Except that was probably someone trying to do a cannon shot...

(Also from the same source): Introduction & Line Printer Music.

Since I can't seem to find anything really good on line printer music, I'll share some anecdotes which were shared with me.

The "chain" on line printers (which holds the letters) used to have all the characters in ASCII (or EBCDIC, I presume) order. Notably, A-Za-z was present in unadulterated form. The problem with this is that anyone printing A-Za-z (interpolate for yourself, please) would fire 52 solenoids at once, frequently blowing the power supply (Or as mentioned in an article linked above) firing the chain out of the printer. The solution was to move the characters around the chain and have the printer translate by means of a lookup table (presumably). In any case, some people did go through the effort to figure out where the characters had been moved to on some printers, but this effectively killed line printer music. How do you do a good cannon shot without being able to fire them all at once?

In any case, it's much the same as using a dot matrix printer; You fire off combinations of characters to generate different sounds. The thing here is that making music with line printers dates from the early seventies if not sooner; Since I'm from the late seventies, it predates me. People were making music with line printers before dot matrix printers existed.

It's worthwhile to never forget your roots.

From "Mechanical Music Digest(tm) Archives":
http://www.foxtai l.com/Archives/Digests/199812/1998.12.15.09.html

I heard that some joker put a print file in the hopper which contained the image of the print chain. When _all_ the hammers struck the chain at the same instant it dislodged from its drive wheels and flew through the plastic window of the machine. The repairman muttered, "I've seen this problem before. Wonder what causes it?" Even then there were "viruses" running around to wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting. -- Robbie

Except that was probably someone trying to do a cannon shot...

(Also from the same source): Introduction & Line Printer Music.

Since I can't seem to find anything really good on line printer music, I'll share some anecdotes which were shared with me.

The "chain" on line printers (which holds the letters) used to have all the characters in ASCII (or EBCDIC, I presume) order. Notably, A-Za-z was present in unadulterated form. The problem with this is that anyone printing A-Za-z (interpolate for yourself, please) would fire 52 solenoids at once, frequently blowing the power supply (Or as mentioned in an article linked above) firing the chain out of the printer. The solution was to move the characters around the chain and have the printer translate by means of a lookup table (presumably). In any case, some people did go through the effort to figure out where the characters had been moved to on some printers, but this effectively killed line printer music. How do you do a good cannon shot without being able to fire them all at once?

In any case, it's much the same as using a dot matrix printer; You fire off combinations of characters to generate different sounds. The thing here is that making music with line printers dates from the early seventies if not sooner; Since I'm from the late seventies, it predates me. People were making music with line printers before dot matrix printers existed.

It's worthwhile to never forget your roots.