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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
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)
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
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
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!?
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...?
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