10 Feb
2023
10 Feb
'23
6:37 a.m.
This is far afield even for COFF, so apologies up front. Machines and
OSes we fondly remember get older day by day. But many labs I worked in
during undergrad & grad years and then in the workforce always had a
radio going, and music never seems to age. When I hear Earth, Wind &
Fire's "September" or Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool
Believes," it's
RSTS/E on a PDP11/70 as a teen, my first exposure to computers.
Kraftwerk and Big Audio Dynamite mean Unix with Mike Muuss at Ballistic
Research Lab in the early 90s. I had PX (military Post Exchange)
privileges which Mike used to the fullest to buy fantastic lab
speakers. The old ENIAC room, our work space, had thick walls. :-)
I wonder if particular music transports any others back to computing
days of old. The current lab I'm in receives exactly 1 radio station
from a local high school and streaming is blocked. Not sure that any new
musical memories will be formed for my ever nearer days of retirement!
Musically yours,
Mike Markowski
10 Feb
10 Feb
7:19 a.m.
This brings to mind an amusing anecdote from my lab days. Only really involves our usual
fare in that I was on the other side of a wall from an RS/6000. In any case, at the time I
was in metals samples digest, which basically meant all day I was pouring soils and
liquids in and out of tubes, cooking em, wash rinse repeat, so typically would have the
stereo blaring all day.
Well an audit came through one day. I didn't know personally so was just doing the
usual. Suddenly this guy in the cleanest lab coat I've ever seen in environmental
walks in with a clipboard and I immediately run over and shush the radio, expecting
admonishment from the managerial type escorting him about.
Instead, he asks that I turn it back on as anything else would be altering my typical work
day and would misrepresent my practices in the context of the audit. I'll forever
remember that day as the day my tunes of the day factored into a formal audit, and not
even in the disciplinary way I would've thought. Luckily after that humanizing
moment, the audit itself was a breeze, I think he even glossed over a few things because
he was enjoying the tunes too.
So the lesson I learned that day is that everything, including your background
entertainment, can be considered a condition of your working space and eliminating it for
audits might actually misrepresent the nature of your work environment.
- Matt G.
------- Original Message -------
On Thursday, February 9th, 2023 at 4:37 PM, Mike Markowski <mike.ab3ap(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
This is far afield even for COFF, so apologies up
front. Machines and OSes we fondly remember get older day by day. But many labs I worked
in during undergrad & grad years and then in the workforce always had a radio going,
and music never seems to age. When I hear Earth, Wind & Fire's
"September" or Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes," it's
RSTS/E on a PDP11/70 as a teen, my first exposure to computers. Kraftwerk and Big Audio
Dynamite mean Unix with Mike Muuss at Ballistic Research Lab in the early 90s. I had PX
(military Post Exchange) privileges which Mike used to the fullest to buy fantastic lab
speakers. The old ENIAC room, our work space, had thick walls. :-)
I wonder if particular music transports any others back to computing days of old. The
current lab I'm in receives exactly 1 radio station from a local high school and
streaming is blocked. Not sure that any new musical memories will be formed for my ever
nearer days of retirement!
Musically yours,
Mike Markowski
7:43 a.m.
On Thu, 9 Feb 2023, Mike Markowski wrote:
[...]
I wonder if particular music transports any others
back to computing
days of old. The current lab I'm in receives exactly 1 radio station
from a local high school and streaming is blocked. Not sure that any
new musical memories will be formed for my ever nearer days of
retirement!
"Computer Games" by Mi-Sex (sp?), filmed at CDC HQ in North Sydney,
Australia; all those spinning tapes in the background...
And yep, Kraftwerk :-) I saw them in concert.
-- Dave
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.
11 Feb
11 Feb
1:13 a.m.
Paul Winalski wrote:
Thanks for the story! In the early 70s the music was mostly playing
from the old PDP-6 (the loudspeakers are visible in photos from inside
the lab). However, it was always located on the 9th floor. I wonder if
what you heard could have been from the Logo group, which was part of
the AI lab? I understand they had a "music box" for children to play
with.
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". 
1:05 a.m.
When I started at Fortune Systems in 1981, they had just rented a large empty warehouse
space in San Carlos that was just perfect for playing music loudly! We worked crazy hours
so I took in my stereo system and some records. Once the 9 to 5 people went home we
cranked up the volume and listened to local college radio stations or records. Soon people
started bringing in their own favorite records. Employee ages ranged from 18 to 50+ &
from variety of backgrounds so we had quite an eclectic collection of music. I also recall
listening to hours of various versions of "Pipeline" and later "Louie
Louie" specials on KFJC! Once we moved into a new facility the dynamics and the
acoustics changed so I brought the stereo system home, along with a few records that no
one claimed!
Somewhat related: there was enough RF leakage when the Fortune motherboard was not in the
case. I could "tune into it" near a Jazz FM station. That was quite useful
because the noise pattern changed depending on what the system was doing. I could be doing
something else and I could hear if the system crashed or the pattern changed to something
unusual! I'd probably recognize those noise patterns even now - just as most of us
oldtimers recognize dialup sounds!
On Feb 9, 2023, at 5:10 PM, Mike Markowski
<mike.ab3ap(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is far afield even for COFF, so apologies up front. Machines and OSes we fondly
remember get older day by day. But many labs I worked in during undergrad & grad
years and then in the workforce always had a radio going, and music never seems to age.
When I hear Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" or Doobie Brothers'
"What a Fool Believes," it's RSTS/E on a PDP11/70 as a teen, my first
exposure to computers. Kraftwerk and Big Audio Dynamite mean Unix with Mike Muuss at
Ballistic Research Lab in the early 90s. I had PX (military Post Exchange) privileges
which Mike used to the fullest to buy fantastic lab speakers. The old ENIAC room, our
work space, had thick walls. :-)
I wonder if particular music transports any others back to computing days of old. The
current lab I'm in receives exactly 1 radio station from a local high school and
streaming is blocked. Not sure that any new musical memories will be formed for my ever
nearer days of retirement!
Musically yours,
Mike Markowski
3:09 a.m.
On 2/10/23, Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote:
Somewhat related: there was enough RF leakage when the Fortune motherboard
was not in the case. I could "tune into it" near a Jazz FM station.
Stan Rabinowitz, longtime member of DEC's PDP-8 software group,
discovered that the same could be done with the PDP-8. He wrote a
program to play music on the PDP-8 that way.
That was
quite useful because the noise pattern changed depending on what the system
was doing.
Back when I was in grad school my hearing was keen enough that I could
hear the high-pitch noise of television set vertical retrace and
acoustic burglar alarm systems. The power supply on the VAX-11/780
emitted a steady sound at about 15KHz, which I could hear. The pitch
varied depending on what the system was doing. There was a particular
sequence of pitch changes when the spooling system was about to start
a print job. I used to astound people by pointing at the line printer
a second or two before the print job started.
-Paul W.
8:53 a.m.
In 1996, a Unix conference in Melbourne had a visit to the reconstructed first (valve)
computer in Australia, CSIRAC.
[ last extracts all about
There was a reconstructed audio of ’tunes’ played in 1951 at a conference.
I recall at the time being told that an AM radio had, at one time, been used to play tunes
from the beast.
They controlled square waves produced by ALU for different amplitudes on a single
frequency to approximate AM.
Can’t find a reference to that now :(
Dave Horsfall, IIRC, was at that event & knows radio.
Might correct my recollection.
There was a loudspeaker connected to the machine, which seems to be all that’s written
about.
CSIRAC is the only pre-1950 computer in the world to be preserved.
All others were broken up for scrap - their useful life over.
IIRC, the console of the Manchester Mk 1 was found near a railway line, used as part of a
retaining wall.
It was preserved accidentally, not for any good reason but the lack of industry /
imagination of Australia bureaucrats
and cheap wharehouse storage :)
When I worked on early IBM 370’s, older operators talked about tuning in (AM) radios to
systems
to monitor operation - no refs, sorry.
Exactly what’s mentioned in this note and another with the line spooler.
On 11 Feb 2023, at 06:05, Bakul Shah
<bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote:
Somewhat related: there was enough RF leakage when the Fortune motherboard was not in the
case. I could "tune into it" near a Jazz FM station.
That was quite useful because the noise pattern changed depending on what the system was
doing.
=======
Long article by working expert, well illustrated.
CSIRAC
<https://www.musicainformatica.org/topics/csirac.php>
Since I deal with the history of computer music as I could not dedicate an article to
this subject also?
For many readers far from new but definitely important to form a complete picture of what
happened at the turn of the fifties.
In the last months of 2014, I worked to put together the facts of some pioneering
experiences of computer music
that took place in the United States, more or less in the same years of CSIRAC.
From this point of view, the Australian experiment completes the path that I presented in
October 2014
at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome on the occasion of the 20th Colloquium on
Music Informatics.
=======
CSIRAC links
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/links>
The Computer CSIRAC, Film, 1965. CSIRO Film Unit
[ on occasion of decommissioning ]
15 min
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvbU00dpnlg>
=======
The music of CSIRAC
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music>
This is a very brief extract from the book Australia’s First Computer Music,
available in Australia through Common Ground Publishing
and internationally through Amazon.
Used with kind permission.
Paul Doornbusch
=======
The loudspeaker: The music of CSIRAC
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music/speaker>
Although the musical developments with the CSIR Mk1 were accomplished in isolation and
with no precedence,
it was not unique at that time.
The music played by the Ferranti Mark I was recorded by the BBC in September 1951.
Reconstruction of the music played by CSIRAC
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music/reconstruction>
Audio reconstruction of CSIRAC playing Colonel Bogey (MOV 76.5 KB) (c.1951)
77kB
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/video_file/0010/3775483/ColonelBogey.mov>
Acknowledgements, The music of CSIRAC
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music/acknowledgements>
Sources & Links
=======
The music played by CSIRAC
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/music/music-played>
The first programmers of the CSIR Mk1 were Geoff Hill and Trevor Pearcey. Geoff Hill had
perfect pitch and came from a very musical family.
Hill was the first person to program the CSIR Mk1 to play a musical melody.
It was played publicly for the first public exhibition of the computer on the 7th to 9th
of August in 1951,
at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney.
Audio – The technical feature more interesting, given the subject of this site, was the
presence of a speaker.
The fact that the CSIR MK1 was equipped with a device of this kind was not a big news,
since also others computer in circulation in those years had a pretty common thing.
=======
The Last of the First, CSIRAC: Australia’s First Computer
(PDF 4.9 MB)
<https://cis.unimelb.edu.au/about/csirac/last-of-the-first>
Book
many images, many interviews.
=======
Geoffrey W Hill
<https://csiropedia.csiro.au/hill-geoffrey/>
The CSIR Mk1 ran its first test programs in late 1949,
and it was the fifth electronic stored program computer ever developed.
It embodied many features novel at the time and was able to operate more than 1000 times
faster than the best mechanical calculators.
The machine was officially opened in 1951 and used to solve problems both for the
Radiophysics Laboratory and outside organisations.
It was decommissioned in 1955 and shipped to Melbourne.
Geoff Hill was the main programmer at that time and he used the machine to play musical
melodies.
These melodies, mostly from popular songs, were;
‘Colonel Bogey’, ‘Bonnie Banks’, ‘Girl with Flaxen Hair’ and so on.
The CSIR Mk1 was dismantled in mid 1955 and moved to The University of Melbourne.
On 14 June 1956 the Mk1 was recommissioned and renamed CSIRAC
and the new Computation Laboratory at the University of Melbourne was officially opened.
CSIRAC was available as a general computing workhorse and in the period from June 1956 to
June 1964 processed over 700 computing projects.
In November 1964, Dr. Frank Hirst switched CSIRAC off for the last time and it was
donated to the Museum of Victoria.
=======
CSIRAC Collection
<https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/3145>
5 images
=======
CSIRAC, The First Computer in Australia, 1949-1964
<https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/1337>
CSIRAC, designed and built by CSIR scientists, was the first stored-memory electronic
computer in Australia.
In 1996, CSIRAC was loaned to the Department of Computer Science at the University of
Melbourne
where it was reassembled and used as the centrepiece for a conference
celebrating the 40th anniversary of its recommissioning in Melbourne in June 1956,
which brought together computing pioneers who had worked with CSIRAC.
The machine was again temporarily displayed by the Museum at its Moreland store in
November 1999, at a celebration to mark its 50th anniversary.
Following several years of dedicated work by Museum staff and volunteers from the CSIRAC
history team at the University of Melbourne,
CSIRAC was placed back on public display,
forming the centrepiece of the @digital.au exhibition in the Science & Life Gallery
when the new Melbourne Museum opened at Carlton Gardens in October 2000.
The display presented the computer as it appeared when set up at the University of
Melbourne Computation Laboratory in 1956.
In November 2010, CSIRAC was transferred to a smaller display on the west side of the
Lower Ground Floor Entrance Lobby at Melbourne Museum
In November 2017, CSIRAC was transferred to Scienceworks in Spotswood,
where it was initially held in temporary storage,
before being placed on public display once again in June 2018.
=======
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
10:20 a.m.
On Sat, 11 Feb 2023, steve jenkin wrote:
In 1996, a Unix conference in Melbourne had a visit to
the reconstructed
first (valve) computer in Australia, CSIRAC.
[...]
Can’t find a reference to that now :(
Dave Horsfall, IIRC, was at that event & knows radio.
Might correct my recollection.
My ears are burning :-)
No. I don't recall that, but I may have written about it in AUUGN (I wrote
heaps of articles in those golden days).
I do recall a visit to KRE's machine room, though; the PIN for his machine
room was "1428" (the first four digits of the fractional part of 22/7, of
course).
I don't recall going to Monash, though; umm, remind me? The bloke with
the TTY driver hangup? He spoke at a few AUUGs.
CSIRAC is the only pre-1950 computer in the world to
be preserved. All
others were broken up for scrap - their useful life over.
Sacrilege...
IIRC, the console of the Manchester Mk 1 was found
near a railway line,
used as part of a retaining wall.
Heh :-) I'm currently writing an emulator for that thing (just for fun, of
course); now, where the hell can I find some sample programs to verify the
thing?
-- Dave (VK2KFU for the radio bit)
12 Feb
12 Feb
1:24 a.m.
Dave Horsfall [11/02/2023 05.20]:
You may check out these:
<http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/computer50/www.computer50.org/mark1/simulators.html>
--
Hilsen Harald
Слава Україні!
IIRC, the
console of the Manchester Mk 1 was found near a railway line,
used as part of a retaining wall.
Heh :-) I'm currently writing an emulator for that thing (just for fun, of
course); now, where the hell can I find some sample programs to verify the
thing?
11 Feb
11 Feb
10:40 p.m.
On 2/10/23 9:53 PM, steve jenkin wrote:
In 1996, a Unix conference in Melbourne had a visit to
the reconstructed first (valve) computer in Australia, CSIRAC.
[ last extracts all about
There was a reconstructed audio of ’tunes’ played in 1951 at a conference.
I recall at the time being told that an AM radio had, at one time, been used to play
tunes from the beast.
They controlled square waves produced by ALU for different amplitudes on a single
frequency to approximate AM.
This page has a bit of Beethoven's 5th using that technique on a pdp-8.
What, no stereo?? :-)
https://www.pdp8online.com/sound/sound.shtml
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11 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
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Bakul Shah -
Dave Horsfall -
Harald Arnesen -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Mike Markowski -
Paul Winalski -
segaloco -
steve jenkin