10 Feb
2023
10 Feb
'23
9:23 p.m.
On 2/10/23, Lars Brinkhoff <lars(a)nocrew.org> wrote:
The MIT AI lab seemed to favor Beatles and Bach.
That they did. In the late '70s I was interning at IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Center, which at that time was on the 4th floor of 545
Technology Square in Cambridge MA. We had about half the floor. The
other half was part of MIT's AI lab. Our timesharing terminals were
in a room with a rather thin wall with the AI lab on the other side.
Someone in that room was debugging a music-playing program. The test
song was the Beatles' "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite". I got to
listen to that being played incessantly (and often wrongly) for an
entire afternoon, sometimes with one note being held for many seconds
when a breakpoint was hit. It drove me crazy.
-Paul W.