Slashdot Mirror
Symphony For Dot Matrix Printers
nico_DNS writes: ""The Symphony for dot matrix printers is a work which transforms obsolete office technology into an instrument for musical performance. The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology: the dot-matrix printer. Specifically, it employs the noises the printers make as the sole sound source for a musical composition. Leaving the constituent elements untouched, the process imposes a new order upon them, reorganizing the sounds along a musical structure. ""
Yow! Just imagine
Beowulf cluster of these!
(Ouch! Karma deathwish.)
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
I wonder if Verese saw this coming? Late at night our local college radio sometimes plays 'music' that includes fax machines, line printers, and anything that can be recorded.
Since I'm stuck at work w/o the soundcard can anyone verify if this sounds good?
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set scanner to SCSI ID #0
boot system while holding down Scan button
you will hear "Ode to Joy" as Beethoven intended it-with the scan motor's whine :)
It isn't over until the fat 'matrix sings?
(Sorry, have a fever, should be sleeping.)
Wonder what other computer components could be used to make music? Hard disk spinning up/down or acessing, removable media drives, cd-rom trays going in/out, tape drives running, etc... :)- ------------------------------
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"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
It would be even cooler if it used other computer noises... typing, fan noise, HD grinding (fsck), monitor degausing(sp?), ink jet, mouse clicks... on second thought maybe that would just sound like my office...
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
I can hardly wait. Now if they would only add a daisy-wheel percussion section, we'd be all set.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
Such as a permanent logging facility.
/var/log/secure, /var/log/messages, or any of your other favourite logs to the line printer.
Send the outputs of
Hard logs. Good securrity. Hackers: Try erasing these puppies. Better bring a lighter!
Now, Dot Matrix printers to Music would be interesting. They could probably use a few old DEC line printers for good bass.
Later models (24 pin) would be good for higher-pitch sounds.
I suppose old 'typewriter like' printers don't count?
There is something extremely peaceful and soothing to these songs. I looped them back-to-back for an hour or so, and I swear it was among the most transcendant experiences I've had this year.
They also have a distinct 20th century edginess to them; whoever arranged these had quite the mastery of rhythm. ;-)
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I can hear it now. Beethoven's symphony in Screech-Major.
Other uses of old dot matrix printers include:
Cheap alarm clock alternative
80 movie props
prop doors open
small boat anchor
But the history of this very cool idea goes all the way back to one of the old kit-computers where you toggled in the entire program using switches and got results from a couple of LEDs. It produced a different frequency whine depending on how hard the processor was working. Somebody got it to play "Mary Had A Little Lamb" at a meeting of an early Homebrew Computer Club. I can't remember which computer or club specifically, though.
I remember reading _years_ ago (when dot matrix printers weren't obsolete equipment!) about someone writing a concerto for dot-matrix printer and orchestra. Even got it performed with a real orchestra. Basically the printer starts out just making noises and attempting to get in on the musical act, and by the end of the piece it is harmonising with the rest of the orchestra. The piece finishes with a wild dot-matrix printer cadenza!
Anyone know any more about this? I've tried a couple of web searches but not found anything. We are talking about 10 years ago if I recall right.
Baz
I downloaded it and tested it but there must have been a bunch of noise on my cabling: my SETI@Home suddenly reported that it found Beethoven living on some obscure planet. Highly unlikely.
I don't have a dot-matrix anymore, is there an emulator I can use with a regular soundcard?
Duh! Heh!
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
I'm ashamed to admit that I've found myself tapping my foot to the rhythm of the printer more than once. They've got more sense of rhythm than the average white boy, that's for sure.
obTroll: I will take these hot grits from you with my hand, and pour them down my pants.
I used to have the program but I hardly ever used it. I was always afraid of damaging such an expensive piece of equipment!
Can't get on the site, but I wonder if Epson MX-80 printers were used. They were nice, but the noisiest pritners ever.
Was it the Diablo series of printers that had their own soundproofing case?
This is all nice and interesting, being a new musical form, but how many people are actually going to listen to it?
However, I can imagine musicians sampling this into their own recordings.
My $.02
Arun
And I thought boy bands were bad!
Hmmmm. I just squeaked in right before the server seemed to bow to the traffic. I did manage to get the three mp3's however. Very interesting stuff. I wonder how these things are controled and synchronized and all that? Unfortunately, I couln't grab the documentary quicktime clip or get and pictures to load.
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
I love it. This is what printers were meant to be; 150lb steel behemoths that send men to their deaths; that scare bystanders when they start printing a job; that suck up paper by the 20 pound boxful in an hour. I got mine from the dumpster at my University when they threw it out. Cleaned it up, WD-40'd the hammer array, replaced a couple of burned out bulbs in the buttons, and it's worked fine for the last 5 years and counting. It was hell hauling up the stairs, though. I remember puting a fake arm and leg in the printer at school one halloween. Freaked out a freshman! Tee hee! God, do they still make line printers like this anymore?
Isn't this old news? The sites were posted in an earlier thread.
The link is posted in this comment.
Does this mean we can all be karma whores and submit user posts as news?
--Jeff
Telling technocrap collectors like myself about a project like this one gets me thinking. I personally have an Epson LQ 500, and at my office we've got a couple OTC 850s, and Oki 320, and a Fujitsu 3300, all collecting dust. Now, I'm sure I can create a nice dot matrix quartet or quintet. Now throw in an Epson Stylus 800, though it's an inkjet, it's actually got a rythmn to it when it's charging it's printheads.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
(by stabbing them over and over again... for several minutes... in the same location... with almost imperceptible variations to my rhythm... until those listening to the murder would fall into a trance-like state of understanding the structure of what I am doing.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We set up AM radios next to our Apple II's -- before FCC mandated EMI shielding -- and use processor RF harmonics to play tunes.
Mirror Mirror
On the Wall
Who has the fastest Mirror
Of them All?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
I remember using the tape drive switch on a BBC B microcomputer to make music and you could even make it make speech-like noises of you clicker it on and off at the right frequency.
:)
It was a fairly heavy duty switch but one had to replace them every now and then doing that...
:)
The BBC would also sing to you as it operated, you could tell what it was doing by the electronic noises it made
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I remember people writing music routines for mechanical scientific calculators, the old
monsters made by Marchant and others.
We used to have rooms of these things for statistics classes when I went to college, although I can't remember anyone doing a multipart score. Maybe someone at MIT?
Paul P. did this much earlier (mid 80s if I recall correctly)... you can find it on CD at better record stores (look under the 20th Century Composers section if they have one, if not, get out of Sam Goody) -- He did it manually instead of over a network, but the sound and "message" remained the same.
It's the new TLD for cyberscifi and classical music.
Coolasmovie.matrix , Wagner.matrix
And they thought jello could start fires....
--
+&x
Anyone have a mirror ? Or someone email the files and I'll put up a mirror.
I downloaded these and listened to them a few days ago.
Unfortunately, the MP3's on the web site seem to be just short excerpts of the the whole symphony.
Now, I listen to a lot of music, from classical to rock to various electronica. I was impressed by this - I had expected it to be kind of a gimmick, or kind of a joke. But what I heard actually sounded musically interesting. Better than a lot of modern music, anyway. If I saw the whole thing available on CD I would buy it.
Your opinion, of course, may vary.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
back in the "Computer Noise" thread. Cheater.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
They could probably also use many current Epson ink jet printers. Mine plays a little tune every time I turn it on.
I've never understood why those printers make so much noise. The whiring and buzzing seems to last for about 30 seconds! My HP deskjet doesn't make any sound at all on power-up.
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Gort! Klatu Barata Nikto!
And I thought my printer only hummed because it didn't know the words...
Now if only they could synchronize your hard drives to the printer music, so you could get a higher range. Throw in the fans and the modem and you could do a quartet.
We never did do it, though.
--jdp Maintainer of VisEmacs
Dot-matrix nearly forgotton? Not quite. It may not be used too much on the desktop anymore but dot-matrix printers are still very widely used for largescale print jobs. The company I work for has several very large Printek and IBM dot-matrix printers used for printing invoices, house bills, and ton's of other stuff off our AS/400. Nothing else can match their speed or flexability. Nothing can top them when it comes to printing on forms. It just pumps out hundreds of them out nonstop for hours. Many of them have multiple tractors allowing different types of forms to be printed on a single printer without changing paper. Printek's new printers are capable of doing barcoding on dot-matrix. Dot-matrix technology is developing, not disapearing.
Nothing like paying a little extra for firmware logic that causes wear and tear on your hardware. :) The dotmatrix symphony uses the technology as it's meant to work, so does (arguably) the HP scanner hack. But what about hard-drive races?? (I wish I had the link handy.. it's probably in the Jargon File somewhere.)
Next: New from Nvidia, a graphics driver that sets your monitor sync out of range, to the tune of "Flight of the Bumblebee".
Really, it makes me wonder. Are these Easter Eggs the reason why most software is late? Or do they just get written out of boredom when someone else drops the ball, and coders have nothing better to do.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Yes, I remember that well. I'm pretty sure it was by a Winnipeg native composer by the name of Victor Davies. He also did a symphony using car horns, which I saw performed on TV once. Very well done, very musical.
A small description of that concert is available here.
Victor Davies' website is at http://www.goodmedia.com/vdavies/. I recommend you check some of his music out. He is a phenominal composer.
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
Am I the only one who finds this mildly disturbing? Sure the idea is creative and unique, but dot matrix music? Well, whatever floats their boat.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
John Hughes the third Used a dot matrix printer for percussion and ambience on his band Bill 'Ding's Trust in god, but tie up your camel' Cd. The concept has always intrigued me. it's great to see the concept expanded upon. next step?
I went on a tour of an FAA air traffic control center many years ago. They had a line printer that could play the "Can-Can." Millions of dollars of machinery and thousands of lives hanging in the balance, and that's the most vivid memory I came away with...
From "Mechanical Music Digest(tm) Archives":
http://www.foxtai l.com/Archives/Digests/199812/1998.12.15.09.html
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Remember the dot-matrix"?
Hell, I can remember many a Monday I didn't want to get up for school, as Dr. Demento was on at 1AM on monday mornings. I distinctly remember a piece entitled "Symphony for full orchestra with a typewriter" - how's *THAT* for old-school tech producing music?
If anyone knows who that's by, or how to find a copy of it, please mail me - it's been lingering in my mind and I've been waiting for an appropriate time to mention it.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
Now if only we could find someone who uses potatos to power the printers...
This page accidentally left blank
Are they going to use C# for the programming? It seems oddly appropriate.
Quick, hide! They're arming themselves with fruits and vegetables!
Sheesh, what a loud thing! In fact, I used it during my whole four years in college (1994-1998). My roommates and neighbors could hear it! Haha!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
of the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy when they used to make music out of the DEC computers at MIT...
Newsflash !!!!!!!!!!
Dotmatrix printers not obsolete !!!!!
Try printing 7 part forms on a laser printer. Anybody who has to deal with any organization that uses forms probably knows this. This is why wide carriage 1050cps impact printers are still pretty expensive.
I seem to remember seen something along these lines on the old Ripley's Believe is or Not show a while back.
--
Okay, premature
Rushed to get in karma post
While it was still true
Ack! Help! Cannot stop
Self-expression in haiku
<THUD!> Ah. That's better. Thank you...
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
In his song "Intruder" off the untitled album commonly known as "Melting Faces" It sounds like he sampled a dot matrix printer and pitched bended it. Way cool. I think it would have been in the early 1980's.
This is a boring sig
One of my dorm-mates once used his dot-matrix printer to get back at some rudeness on his roomie's part. Said roomie had stayed on the phone till about 2 AM arguing with his girlfriend, and my friend was trying to get some sleep before an 8 AM exam. Didn't work out too well.
So my friend waits till a night when the roomie comes home drunk. He lets the roomie sleep for about an hour, then sends a half-megabyte text file to the printer.
All bolded.
With the printer set to half-speed mode.
That was the last time the roomie kept my friend needlessly awake.
Aero
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
Take a look at this story from The Payphone Project!
How long before someone figures out how to stick a MIDI port and hardware on it for fun MIDI action? I can see it now...
"Why are you hooking your printer up to your SoundBlaster MIDI port?"
"To make it sound better."
He's got an instrumental song that's beat is driven by dot matrix printers.
I can't remember which song, nor which album it's on, but it's definitely worth a listen.
A dot-matrix printer at Andover
Played the same tune over and over
"Make that thing stop"
Said a sleepy sys-op
"I'm still nursing my IPO hangover!"
Still not haiku?
The Symphony focuses the listener's attention on a nearly forgotten technology:
The sound of your web site getting slashdotted because you came up with something pretty dam cool?
Nope you don't heard that much, the hard drives grinning, swapping away, the "clicks" of the network router when the leds are blinking to fast, the sound of your network admin screaming "where the hell is this bandwidth going?"
Ah the sound of victory
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Does anybody out there have a copy of LONE.EXE? I have searched for it on the web in vain.
This was a program that played "The Lone Ranger" music through the PC speaker. The really impressive thing about it was that it was supposedly written on a pre-PC computer that used a similar instruction set and architecture to Intel (can anybody cite an example of that?).
Anyway, another really impressive thing about this program was that it was only 4k for something like 5 minutes or more of music, albeit in an electronic sounding format. I had a copy of this on my old 286, and I saved the hard drive. Unfortunately, it used an interface standard that predated ISA. I've been told it's possible to adapt the drive, but I have neither the time nor the money to look into it, and it may not be on there anyway.
This is also of some historical interest, as it is possibly one of the earliest "PC music" programs. It may even be 25 years old or more, so until I find it, I'll just have to make sure that nothing damages the old hard drive because it may be a "historical artifact".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Hrm, I still got 2 Dot Matrix printers, I like to print ASCII porn out on them, it sounds sexy when it prints to.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
How about a MIDI or maybe even wave-oriented daemon for *nix that gives an indication of the system state?
I'm thinking maybe drums for disk drives, flutes for network I/O,...?
It seems an awful waste to think of all the servers out there with sound cards lying uselessly inside, why not put them to good use. You could get a feel for how well the computer was working, just by listening.
Anyone?
First it was MP3's, now it's this. RIAA does have a reason to worry about computers. They'll probably sue the printer manufacturers and try to get it banned, probably through something they call "Noise Pollution Ordinances". Remember to resist these ordinances if they are ever proposed in your community.
Years ago (1970's) I heard a computer play Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Flight of the Bumblebee" at a museum of science in Paris. The audio device was a cheap AM transitor radio held close to a mainframe.
This computer normally emitted radio waves during operation, and the "program" that was running during the demonstration was written especially to emit radio waves that played "The Flight of the Bumblebee".
It is better then some ambient I've listened to. I especially like "Control to Efficiency".
I remember back in the TRS-80 days BEFORE there was any sound where you made sound by running processes and then listening on a radio to the RF generated by it. Who else remembers that??
Correct -- these things have been around for ages. I first saw chain printer music demos on an IBM 360 in 1966, and they were already old and famous at that time. In roughly that same time frame I saw an IBM 1401 program which played music through a radio sitting on the CPU cabinet. I saw the CDC device referenced in the article some years later, but I believe it worked via a third mechanism. I think a speaker was hard wired to a D/A converter fed from one of the CPU registers.
You scan and OCR the document, preferably with a sheet feeder.
Sent from my iPhone
It would have been even more amusing if your last haiku had read:
Ack! Help! Cannot stop
Self-expression in haiku
<THUD!> Ah, better. Thanks...
--Phil (Twice five syllables / plus seven can't say much, but / that's haiku for you.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
Historical note: Sound on the Apple II was tied to an address line (or address decoder?) so that when you peek'd OR poke'd at a location (read or wrote) in memory, you got a click. By doing this more or less frequently (IE, Pulse-width modulation) you could come up with some decent sound, at the cost of CPU time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One of the most vivid memories I have of my C64 is a little program which played "kung fu fighting", in clear AM quality audio. It was amazing for its time, I could hardly believe it.
-- iCEBaLM
at the end of 'ringfinger' (the last track on 'pretty hate machine') there is a twisted guitar (that's what i've heard it claimed to be) which sounds almost exactly like a dot matrix.
to me anyway..
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
Symphony for Dot Matrix?
Man-oh-man, it must be Friday, 'cuz I read something totally different
Sympathy for Dot Matrix
(to the tune of "Sympathy for the Devil" By Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a past that you must face
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
I was around when TRS-80s
Had their moment of dubious fame
Made Damn sure that Tandy
Washed their hands and sealed your fate.
CHORUS
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around in adding machines
When the computer saw the time to change
I handled carbons and NCR's
As the lasers screamed in vain
Built like a tank
Held a general's rank
When line printers raged
And the toner stank
CHORUS
I watched with glee
While compatibility
and the price you paid
Were the laser's grave
You always knew
What screwed your CRT
It was EMI
From the DMP
Let me please introduce myself
I'm a past that you must face
And I'm the best for preprinted forms
That can't be filled in any other way
CHORUS
Just as every box is a terminal
Most of your print queue is text
I'm noisy as Hell
Just call me Lucifer
'Cause for some jobs I'm still the best
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your forms to waste.
CHORUS
Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell me honey, baby guess my name
Tell me baby, what's my name
Tell you one time, you're to blame
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Oh, yeah
What's my name
Tell me, baby, what's my name
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- Ooo, who -- who
Oh, yeah
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
...of the technique of producing sound from a TI graphing calculator. Essentially, you hold a walkman radio up to the calc, then use certain assembler instructions to generate different levels of interference.
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
The song "Thieves" on "The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste" has sampled printers.
Check it out!
Blar.
a sound card. Anyone want to write drivers?
He'd probably wonder what it sounded like, since he was deaf and all... :-)
The HP ScanJet 4C actually came with a program called 'Jukebox' (i think?) that played ode to joy, when the saints come marching in, and a few other similar songs. I think it had a total of 5 tunes (quite a jukebox!) and it froze the rest of the computer while using it, but everyone always got a kick out of hearing the scanner buzz out 'It's a Small World' with its scan head motor.
:)
Quite interesting. I tried to figure out the file format, but to no avail... I think if I could feed MIDI files to my scanner, I wouldn't need any MP3's!
jason
I've seen a dot matrix "symphony" performance during the opening event of the net_condition exhibition at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany (ZKM, www.zkm.de). It was very cool! People really liked it and wanted (and got) an encore. Of course it was all spiced up (multimedia wise) with little cameras mounted to the printer heads with images projected to large screens.
Ah - back when computers were BIG and real programmers could enter programs via the consol switches.
It's noteworthy to mention that this 2nd symphony was commissioned by the Daniel Langlois Foundation.
Doen't ring a bell? How about Softimage?
The Foundation has manu objectives.
The radio on top of the CPU cabinet was just picking up RFI on the AM channel. There is no wired connection into the computer. You could also get music by putting an AM radio next to a HP programable calculator and running a program.
Your wallet stays open. Our source remains closed. We are MSFT
Make a beautiful musical team. Just watch out for head knocking on the 1541.
Hands in my pocket
You know, *every* time someone here on Slashdot talks about an old freeware or public-domain program for the PC and how they wish they still had it, I've found the program within about 5 minutes.
Hey, all you nostalgics! Go here:
OAK Software Repository
Right from the main page, go to the section called PC/Blue Disk Library, and go to the PCBLUE subdirectory. Then download the big master index (pbcat.zip). Find the archive file that holds the software you're looking for (trust me, they're all in there), and enjoy!
In your particular case, you're thinking of the "PianoMan" software. There were actually many, many different tunes available with that program, not just the William Tell Overture (a.k.a. the Lone Ranger's theme song). The PianoMan program had the ability to generate COM files from the included music (MUS) files. That's why the Lone Ranger song got distributed so much more than the entire PianoMan package.
Rest assured, if you download Volume 216 from the above archive, and then spend about 2 minutes reading the PianoMan documentation, you'll be able to re-generate that Lone Ranger tune/program.
I think that song is Bucephalus Bouncing Ball maybe on the Come to Daddy EP. It is a pretty quirky song, though I don't recall hearing any dot matrix printer in it.
Boss Hog has a cool noisy little punk rock song on their 95 album (I think) with a badass dot matrix printing in the background throughout the whole track. Good stuff yo.
-ali
I still have my old Figitsu DL 2400 Dot mAtrix kicking around for document printing. Sure it gets a paper jam once and awhile...and the strange hissing noise coming from the electronic circuits is worth worrying about. But it has been years and it is still going strong. It ways more than 5 full tower cases but can still print whatever font you want. It also shakes whatever table you have it on like crazy and makes a hell of alot of noise.
But she still works...just like my old 2400 baud external modem.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
I remember a program that would make your commodore 64 disk drive play music. it used the disk seek heads and vibrate them at different frequency's to play mary had a little lamb... Granted it would screw your drive up royally but who cared!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I watched Cube the other day, and noticed that the soundtrack featured either a dot matrix printer or a really good simulation. I was idly thinking that it would be neat to a whole piece based on it, but these guys have obviously beat me to the punch.
I also have a Graphtec X-Y plotter, which makes neat sounds, especially from programmatically generated images, such as a cardioid. I've been hacking it to do pencil and watercolor images, with promising results.
Oh well, back to paid hacking now.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
In the dawn of time, overachievers
who didn't have enough homework to keep
them out of trouble used to string FORTRAN
sections in decks of cards together which
would cause a radio, near the main frame processor to play tunes.
A serial bus carrying
different patterns of bits could probably
synthesize any audible square wave tone.[the parity bits might screw it up a little.]
^ ^ ^
One of the more remarkable aspects
of dental caries is that the
trauma to the cheek tissue is
signifigantly greater than
the turgor elaborated about the
damaged roots in many patients.
Sounds like radiation damage
caused by a MICROWAVE LASER.
I was working at Best Western, and the developers and I were having quite an e-mail exchange. At one point someone said that I should include it as an easter egg (it detailed the travails of the project as the users changed everything every month.. bad project management).
I included it, but instead of saying "When the user presses alt AND shift AND control AND K", I accidentally wrote the code to say "When the user presses alt OR shift OR control OR K". Needless to say, it was interesting to watch the users reaction when they tested it and this huge email message pops up when they hit shift-K.
Doh!
You should never, never doubt what nobody is sure about.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I just tried this Easter egg out with the Scanjet 5P and it works, and is a bit humourous because of the time the HP Engineers did to code the scanner motor to play music :) By the way, it sounds pretty good, for a Scanner Motor! :)
A Jedi doesn't drink Coors, a Jedi Drinks Guinness or Bass!
Printers are a nice percussion section, but we
had actual WOODWINDS !
In the early 1980s, we (one of the
"Super-minicomputer" firms - Systems Engineering Labs)
had a bank of 4 6250bpi 9-Track tape drives in the R&D
lab that had vacuum columns to keep the tape
at the proper tension.
These drives made tones when rewinding and seeking.
Needless to say, it was not long before
(ahem) "Bach-up Tapes" were mounted, and a few
Brandenburg Concertos were programmed.
Sadly, in those less "keel" days, everyone
worried about being yelled at for abuse of
company equipment, so it was kept quiet.
I still have the code (in FORTRAN-77) if anyone
happens to have 4 9-Track tape drives with
vacuum columns. (Roger Gourd, if you are reading
this, yes, I still have readable backups of ALL the fun
stuff from our SEL days.
The name of the module? "No Strings Attached", of course.
Science is the art of infallibility, perpetrated upon non-scientists
Now I've got to go out and get a digital recorder- then walk around sampling interesting sounds I hear.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
When I was in high school in 1981, we had a "computer room" which was a classroom with four DecWriter II terminals and 300 baud acoustic modems. (Knocking on the side of the modem to get line noise was fun all in itself!)
They had this program they would run every now and then (like during lunch hour) which generated endless pages of math problems (like four digit addition, two digit multiplication, etc.) for the remedial math students. At 300 baud, the program made this unmistakable sound between the digits (with one or two spaces in between) and the lines under the problems. skritch, skritch, skritch, skritch, thunkswoosh, skritch, skritch, skritch, skritch, thunkswoosh, bzzzzz, bzzzzz, bzzzzz, bzzzzz, thunkunkunkswoosh...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Then they can write a script whose only goal is to create the most verbose log messages. As someone else said, it's hard to grep a stack of paper. But it's even harder to do it when someone is deliberately making your job harder by diluting the stream.
Good thing I read all the way through the responses before I posted about this. I remember this vaguely from the 80's. My maniacal best friend told me about them, along with his copy protection breaking software.
Anybody remember "Impossible Mission?"
bun-fhuinneog agam!
I have an old HDD in which the heads scrape against the disk (sounds almost identical to vinyl record scratching--ie. rap 'music'). Also, PC speakers that have been blown out, a monitor that flickers audiably, an 8" floppy drive and shimmies and shakes (cool oscillation noises depending on the surface on which it rests), a power supply that shoots sparks, a CDROM that sounds like a blow-dryer, and to top it off:
A Windows sound-scheme which consists of only "ding.wav".
-={(.Y.)}=-
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
I'd kill or die for audio files of these tricks you all keep mentioning- singing drives and scanners and bleeps and gltiches. anyone holding? i'll send you a copy of the tracks i use it in if you wish..
wait til their server's not slashdotted.. if they have MP3's available i'm gonna remix the fucker!!
Forget where I heard it.
It's off Come To Daddy, by the way.
Love the cover.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
You might be interested to know that Man or Astroman? are using the same trick on their new album, in a track called -- fittingly, A Simple Text File. Supposedly there's an mp3 of it laying around, but I haven't heard it yet.
Friends of mine are all into this kind of music. I remember hearing about one that did more or less the same as this dot matrix stuff, only with a room full of hard drives and very precisely accessed text files & a bit of perl magic. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might want to listen to (void).mp3 by Alex MacLean, which was 100% generated with a perl script and the logs of a mailing list, and generative.net, where people that are in to this sort of stuff congregate and exchange ideas about what art really is. All very fascinating stuff...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I once heard a Diablo 630 play Jingle Bells...
Just write a program that does:
cr
cr
BELL
cr
cr
BELL
cr
cr
BELL
lf
And an old Apple ][ that had an animated pornographic line drawing that used the Diskdrive to produce appropriate sound effects...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
WhenI was a kid in Great neck, NY, one ngith a month or computer club got to work with the adminstratiosn Honeywell.
:)
One of the techs who worked full time on the machien ahd a deck (yes this was punch cards) that woudlk play christmas carols on the line printer.
Never thought I'd see that again
Heh.. Now... If we can just get those darn printers to play Enter Sandman.. Metallica would really love technology "Fawkin Printers" who do they sue then? HP?
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Twenty-three years ago, when I was in electronics school, we were able to commandeer a military surplus frequency shift keying decoder and teletype printer. After connecting the devices to the audio output of our Drake TR-4 amateur radio transceiver, I would spend hours searching the shortwave bands for fsk transmissions. There for the viewing were live global feeds from Reuters and other news agencies, military communiques and various mysteriously encrypted messages. One day, just before Christmas, I found something that still ranks as the coolest printer music ever! Before my eyes, Christmas scenes were being printed: Santa, Yuletide greetings, a Christmas tree, a wreath, winter landscapes, et. al. Simultaneously, the teletype machine was emitting Christmas melodies that were wonderfully synchronized to the visuals. The author used the full musical capabilities of the teletype--especially the bell--to delightful effect. But that's not all. The fsk feed included quiescent tones that provided perfect harmony! It was the most brilliantly executed multimedia display you can imagine using just a printer. We never knew the origin of the transmission. Given the atmospheric conditions, it could have come from almost anywhere in the world. All traces of the experience are long since destroyed, as no one saved any of the printouts. That day, however, provided an experience I shall never forget.
At last! Lotus releases a version of Symphony that works with dot matrix printers, not just those Selectric-style line printers! Now I can use the spreadsheet-that's-a-graph-and-word-processor-too to print out my love letters, pie charts, AND budget projections! I've been waiting for a new version since before Prince was The Artist Formerly Known As!
One important question: do you need an 80386SX computer with 1MB of RAM to run it? Otherwise I'm out of luck. Blasted MS-DOS 3.3! What if I run Desqview -- is it Quarterdeck certified? It doesn't conflict with Sidekick or other TSRs, I hope. Can't live without those.
I hope it fits on a single app floppy. I hate having to swap floppies just to run a program. 720K ought to be big enough for anything.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It was excel, not word.
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I am the dot in slashdot.org
Unlike many stockhausian works, this one is actually pleasant to listen to. Reminds me more of Kraftwerk than minimalist composers. BTW, I still have my Star NX-10 and a DEC DM printer online 24/7. Pretty decent technology even today, IMHO.
I remember hearing 'Daisy' being played on the Amiga floppy drive. Way cool. Just make sure you don't have any floppy disks in there when you play it though....
T.