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Old Computers Resurrected As Instruments At Bletchley Park
arcticstoat writes with a snippet from bit-tech.com; musician Matthew Applegate "plans on assembling a virtual orchestra of 20 retired relics of computing at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The choice of venue will even allow Applegate to feature the infamous Colossus Mark 2 computer in the event, which was used for code-breaking in World War II and was recently reconstructed at Bletchley Park in 2007. ... A wide selection of computing fossils be used in Applegate's final musical presentation, which is called 'Obsolete?' This includes the Elliot 803 (a 1960s machine with 4KB of memory), the aforementioned Colossus Mark 2, a Bunsviga adding machine (pictured) and a punch card machine. As well as this, there are also some machines that will look nostalgically familiar to kids who grew up with the home computer generation, including a BBC Micro, an Atari 800XL, a Dragon 32 and an Amstrad CPC464." The article's list of the members of this "orchestra" makes an interesting checklist of computer hardware history.
I fully approve. It's definitely time to rethink what obsolescence means, and this musical presentation seems like it will be amazing from an angle of reimagining what old computers are really for.
I will take my kids to see it and tell them that when I'm old, I want them to arrange me in a formation with other old people and make us all make beautiful coincidental sounds that could be construed as music.
Poor Forbin! He will be locked up alnight with that sex female computer scientist.
As well as this, there are also some machines that will look nostalgically familiar to kids who grew up with the home computer generation, including a BBC Micro, an Atari 800XL, a Dragon 32 and an Amstrad CPC464.
What, no Apple ][?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Why is the Colossus "infamous"? It's famous, and it's use saved thousands of lives and shortened the war.
Brett
bbc report with sound and video
open in a tab then buy tickets !!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7895853.stm
tickets links -
March 20th, 2009 http://www.etickets.to/buy/?e=2285
March 21th, 2009 http://www.etickets.to/buy/?e=2373
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
Why the fuck is my browser choking on pixel.quantserver.com?? what is that?
I dunno ... put Privoxy on your box and point your browser at it. I'll bet your problem goes away.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
50 years from now, they'll be using the 'obsolete' BlueGene/L to do stuff like this...
I highly recommend "The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers", by The User. You can find it on eMusic I think (probably elsewhere as well). It's like being in the computer lab of yore, but with style. :)
I'm guessing this won't be a progressive rock thing....
... and do they boot it faster than Vista on current PCs?
Speaking as a former Atari 800XL owner, no. In fact, it got to a point where you could memorize the exact pattern of beepbeeeepbeenbeepbeeeeenbeepbeepbebp..*drive rev.. drive rev*...*beep beeeeep been beeeeen beep...*... and have your own little internal count-down. And, on top of that, it booted into the app you were using. Wanna start another app? Turn off machine, insert new disk, turn it on and hold down the Option key.
In short: your quip was incredibly cheap and utterly unfunny to anybody who actually knows anything about the topic.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a former Atari 800XL owner, no. In fact, it got to a point where you could memorize the exact pattern of beepbeeeepbeenbeepbeeeeenbeepbeepbebp..*drive rev.. drive rev*...*beep beeeeep been beeeeen beep...*... and have your own little internal count-down.
You lucky folks with a disk drive had it good. I had to sit around and wait while my Atari 410 cassette recorder shoveled its bits into the system at an amazing 40 bytes per second. (At least it let you hear the audio track, so you could have cassettes that played music while they loaded.)
A drum is a instrument. A computer - well could be, but for real.
Get up!
What software did that music accompany?
Yeah, I know that the venerable '81 had no "sound" but it could make noise through it's cassette interface ... and somewhere I have an old book for ZX-81 machine code programming which has a program which would play music out though the TV's FM audio ... but it does require de-tuning the channel frequency just a little bit because the '81 doesn't have a audio modulator either.
I really enjoyed my visit to Bletchley Park back in 2005.... wouldn't mind spending another relaxing and pleasant day there again in the future. Just this little problem of being 6000+ miles away.
(The Beeb has a fairly sophisticated Yamaha sound chip ... for some reason, whenever I think of that machine, the tune to Repton plays repeatedly in my mind... along with the 'dings' when a diamond is collected)
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
I had one of those beasts, it was a british clone of the TRS-80 color computer.
6809, the 32k of ram was actually 64k and if you fiddled a bit with the memory controller you could copy the rom to ram and modify the code. Quite a nice little computer!
I wished someone would keep such a line of machines alive for kids today to learn how to code on. There is absolutely no way you're going to completely 'grok' that machine on your desktop, one of these small machines you actually stand a chance.
Best school I ever had...
MP3 Search Engine
hmmm. Now you have me thinking. I have a couple of TRS-80s in the attic... I wonder if anyone has ever gotten linux running on them.
This space available.
You should have tried a C64 loading a floppy diskette. Took almost as long as the ATARI loaded a cassette :)
I'm more surprised there are no Sinclair machines in the orchestra (ZX81, ZX Spectrum) since they were what drove the home computer revolution of the early 80s in the UK.
The ZX81 was incredibly primitive in order to get its price below £100. I think it was the first ever computer you could buy for under £100. It had no colour and no sound, 1k of RAM in its base configuration and 8k of ROM that managed to include some very useful floating-point maths!
There was a hack you could do to in machine code get sound out of it. The cassette interface, for loading and saving programs to tape, made its way to the TV set. It was a bit in an IO register. The CPU was responsible for the TV display, so the screen went funny black and white patterns when it was doing tape IO. Usually you had the TV sound turned off. You could write precise timing loops in machine code to toggle the bit and to generate musical notes.
There was a ZX80/81 machine code book by Toni Baker which had a program to do this. You could play the ZX81 like a piano. The program was only a few hundred bytes long.
The Spectrum took this idea a bit further. The screen was generated by the ULA, so the processor could do sound and tape IO without harming the display. Sound was a single channel through a tiny build in loud-speaker which was modulated using a single bit of an IO register... very similar to tape IO :-)
The Spectrum 128 which came out years later, had an AY-3-8192 3-channel sound chip in addition to the beeper :-)
Stick Men
CPU complexity now sufficient for creative output:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4nhGS0OL4
They are useful.
They are fruitful.
Everything that boots is beautiful!
Built to last... the future is the past!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4nhGS0OL4
Particles, stuff that matters.
I used ring up my mate and tell him to start loading a game into his C64 before walking over to his place. We'd usually have time for a snack before the tape had fully loaded. So no... somewhat slower than Vista.
On the other hand, I had an Apple ][e at the same time and even including the time it took to find the correct 5 1/4 inch floppy disk in one of the many boxes of disks we had, boot the computer and load the entire game, it was still faster than Vista is these days. The downside, of course, was that it only had 16 shades of green available to it and high resolution mode meant 192 x 280 pixels.
Sig matters not. Judge me by my sig, do you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1C9Q5JheOE
This includes the Elliot 803 (a 1960s machine with 4KB of memory), the aforementioned Colossus Mark 2, a Bunsviga adding machine (pictured) and a punch card machine.
I read the slashdot summary and I have to say, the Bunsviga adding machine looks a lot like a grounding plug.
Do you Gentoo!?
Let's hope he knows how to program the Pokey chip for 16 bit sound, otherwise it will play out of tune:
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue34/112_1_16-BIT_ATARI_MUSIC.php
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Where are the 3000 baud modems? the faster modems are screetchy, so the slower ones should be more sing-song. (I'm sort of guessing, as got into the tech biz when 28.8 models were the dial-up rage). I always loved the techy-sounding "bing-bong" of the 56Ks in their day.
This includes the Elliot 803
I think you mean the Elliott 803 You're welcome.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Apple II's were sold over here, they were just not that prevalent.
Yes; the UK hospital my Dad worked at had Apple IIs, but this was one of the few (if only) places I saw them in the UK. Had I not seen them there, it's quite possible that I'd never have seen one at all.
They actually sold Euro-specific versions; reading this I find out that (supposedly) these were mono-only (yuk!) because the smart but NTSC-specific hack Woz used to get crude colour on the original didn't work with PAL.
This explains why my Dad (who used the things quite extensively) was never aware that the Apple II was supposedly capable of colour. I found this surprising, even allowing for the fact that all the ones at the hospital only had green-screen monitors.
I suspect that since the Euro Apples were mono only (regardless of what they were plugged into), references to any colour facilities would have been removed from the manuals. (Assuming they left the firmware relating to the U.S. colour facilities in the ROM for compatibility).
Anyway, I'd guess that the combination of high imported prices and reduced spec hurt its European popularity initially- and that as a result it wouldn't have achieved the critical mass and network effects required to ensure continued popularity in the face of newer and better-specified computers (unlike in the U.S.).
I mean, I don't know how much the Apple II was circa 1981/82, but I doubt that it would have been cheaper than the somewhat high-end and better-specified BBC Micro. And in the absence of any significant pre-existing support for the Apple, I know which one I'd have gone for.
I've got an Apple III as well and they are even rarer - didn't know they existed until I was given one instead of the owner dumping it.
I don't know when he dumped it, but I'd assume that any Apple IIIs are rare enough to be worth a bit now...?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
As someone who did development for Apple ][ add-on hardware in the UK, I can tell you the APPLE ][ was HUGE in the UK.
Huge would be, at best, a relative term. It may have had some popularity behind the scenes in businesses (still being in short trousers during the early 80s, I can't really comment on that). I know that my Dad used them in his work at a hospital.
But even that latter example was (and is) about the only place that I've seen Apple II in the flesh. They were also bordering on nonexistent in the UK educational field and as mass-market home computers.
Only businesses with a PDP11 or DG Nova did not need an Apple ][, The Apple ][ cost about GBP100
£100? I'm calling bullshit on that, and it makes me question the truth of what you said above.
The integer-only, black-and-white, touch keyboard ZX80 was a big deal when it came out in 1980 as the first computer under £100. The ubiquitous rubber-key ZX Spectrum (cheapass peoples' favourite) was £125 for the 16K version when it came out in 1982. And this was during the Apple II's American heyday.
I doubt that the Apple II was *ever* sold for anything even in the same ballpark as £100, even latterly when it was dated and outspecced.
BTW, Visicalc was also available for other computers such as the IBM PC, Atari 800 and Commodore Pet.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Not that I disapprove in theory, but it's fast getting to the point where I can't really justify turning on anything that draws over 5 watts of power to do any sort of computing, aside from my high-powered CS research.
On the other hand, this is art, so cost is irrelevant.
Ok, who was the wiseass who invited the RNC to start writing /. summaries?
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
Whaddya mean 'relics'? I still use my mighty Atari 400. I've cheated though....soldered in a humongous 48KB memory expansion into it.
A 5500/275? Bizarre choice to represent Apple. As others said above, the Apple II would be the logical choice. But if going with a Mac, one of the original all-in-ones (anything from the 128k to the SE/30, really) would be good. But a 5500/275? Those were pretty crap Macs.
ehintz
My memory of the machines of the era was that the Apple II was too expensive in the UK to be widely used as a home computer. Even the BBC Micro was a bit on the expensive side and most UK home users of the time had one of the Sinclair machines that were much cheaper.
The company I worked for had an Apple II bought specifically to run Visicalc. As far as I remember, this was the main driver for sales of Apple II in the UK until the arrival of the IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3.
It was used with all the games I had at the time--let's see if I can remember; my German has suffered greatly over the intervening years:
- Bilderpuzzle (Memory-like card matching game)
- Seeschlacht (Battleship-like game)
- Fische Fischen (fishing game)
- Rasenmaeher ("Lawnmower"--try and mow the lawn without running into obstacles or out of gas, or something like that)