>> Back in '73..'75 an "enterprising soul" wrote a complete
>> "symphony" for a PDP-8. Made use of the various shounds
>> available on our system, primarily (IIRC), the 6 TU-56 Drives
>> (12 tapes), System Console,
>> Line> Printer, 4 ASR-33 and 2 DecWriters....
>
> Ooh, do tell more. What did it sound like? Any recordings available?
>
> --
Alas I know of no recordings, and to be honest I can not remember the tune itself. What I do remember [this was a school district computer]:
1) Having a heading from listening to Bill K, and Erich F "tuning" the program
2) Mr. "C" [music director] coming down and spending hours critiquing!
cswiger <cswiger at widomaker.com> wrote:
> All I want to know is who decided to use \ instead of / for
> directory separators (warming up the tar and holding feathers).
'/' was already taken up for the command line switch introducer character
(not '-' since CP/M and DOS were originally inspired from the culture of
DEC OS's rather than the UNIX culture).
MS
> All I want to know is who decided to use \ instead of / for
> directory separators (warming up the tar and holding feathers).
>
Dont know "who" but the alleged "why" was to avoid confusion in parsing (switches used "/" [same as DEC,CP/M] rather than "-" ala Unix.
On Mar 3 2005, 22:16, Richard A. Cini wrote:
> I had an idea for an Easter Egg within the Altair32 Emulator. I
> remember a story that you could run a certain program on the Altair
and hold
> an AM radio next to the Altair and you would hear music. IIRC, the
song was
> "Daisy" as was played in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
>
> Does anyone (1) have this program in source and/or binary and
(2)
> can someone make a high-quality WAV file of it for me (since I don't
have an
> Altair)?
Sounds (sorry) like a good idea. The inspiration for HAL singing
"Daisy" when he was lobotomised by Dave Bowman in "2001" was that Bell
Labs had demonstrated an IBM 7094 "singing" "Daisy" in 1961. Bell Labs
were doing research into vocal-tract modelling; John Kelly had wired a
speaker to one of the output bits and he and Carol Lochbaum[1]
programmed the vocal, with Max Mathews, who was pioneering digital
music, did the accompaniment. The whole thing was programmed onto
magtape, read back once complete and "played" through the speaker. The
recording they made was also once available on an album called "Music
>from Mathematics".
I'm sure there used to be an article on the web about it, though I
can't seem to find it right now, though I have found references to some
of the Bell Labs reports and tapes:
http://www.mindspring.com/~ssshp/ssshp_cd/ss_btl1.htm (about 2/3 down).
What I can find, though, is a digitised copy of the recording they
made, which I downloaded, so I've put it on my website for you:
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.aifc
I also have an MP3 version, which isn't much inferior (and much
smaller!):
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.mp3
There's an updated, unaccompanied, somewhat shorter, version from later
work (text-to-speech project) at Bell Labs:
www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/languages.htmlwww.bell-labs.com/project/tts/daisy.aiff
[1] sometimes mispelt "Lockbaum"
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
> The p70 was MCA, had one 32-bit and one 16-bit slot.
> This meant... You could insert a full System/370 CPU!!
>
> Imagine that, a VMS portable...!
>
> --
> Tore S Bekkedal <toresbe at ifi.uio.no>
Isn't VMS from D|I|G|I|T|A|L| and *MVS* from IBM?
Or had IBM also a "VMS"?
BTW, what do the letters stand for (inbotb abbreviations)?
- Henk, PA8PDP.
> Jay wrote about a DL11:
> If I exam 776500, I get a 200,
> but anytime I store a value and read it back, there's all
> zero's in the data register.
I will dig up my notes getting characters in and out a M7800
in my 11/35 resurrection using the front panel several years
ago.
This is also an advice: make notes of *everything* you do on
a system, no matter how trivial at this time. Changing a wire,
trying some toggle in tests on the console, behaviour, measured
voltages on pins, etc.
If problems occur later you can go back and do all tests from
your notes. That's why I can write my tests with the M7800 when
I get home (in a few hours from now).
- Henk, PA8PDP.
Before you guys start to laugh at me, I would like to itemize some.
1. The original IBM PC 5150/5160 MB
2. The HP 100LX, 200LX palm PC
3. The original Nexgen pentium class PC
4. The IBM "butterfly" 486 laptop
5. You name it
cheers,
vax, 9000
I have a 7445A at home...anyone know the key sequence?
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of William Donzelli
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 9:00 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Altair32 Emulator "Easter Egg" idea
> That machine also had a very nice Calcomp plotter. I miss plotters.
I thik one of the old HP plotters would "sing" a song using the motors,
given the proper power up sequence.
William Donzelli
aw288 at osfn.org
The adorned "Daisy" is pretty neat!
Does anyone have the original 8080 code used by Dompier at the Homebrew
meeting?
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Pete Turnbull
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 6:17 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Altair32 Emulator "Easter Egg" idea
On Mar 3 2005, 22:16, Richard A. Cini wrote:
> I had an idea for an Easter Egg within the Altair32 Emulator. I
> remember a story that you could run a certain program on the Altair
and hold
> an AM radio next to the Altair and you would hear music. IIRC, the
song was
> "Daisy" as was played in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
>
> Does anyone (1) have this program in source and/or binary and
(2)
> can someone make a high-quality WAV file of it for me (since I don't
have an
> Altair)?
Sounds (sorry) like a good idea. The inspiration for HAL singing
"Daisy" when he was lobotomised by Dave Bowman in "2001" was that Bell
Labs had demonstrated an IBM 7094 "singing" "Daisy" in 1961. Bell Labs
were doing research into vocal-tract modelling; John Kelly had wired a
speaker to one of the output bits and he and Carol Lochbaum[1]
programmed the vocal, with Max Mathews, who was pioneering digital
music, did the accompaniment. The whole thing was programmed onto
magtape, read back once complete and "played" through the speaker. The
recording they made was also once available on an album called "Music
>from Mathematics".
I'm sure there used to be an article on the web about it, though I
can't seem to find it right now, though I have found references to some
of the Bell Labs reports and tapes:
http://www.mindspring.com/~ssshp/ssshp_cd/ss_btl1.htm (about 2/3 down).
What I can find, though, is a digitised copy of the recording they
made, which I downloaded, so I've put it on my website for you:
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.aifc
I also have an MP3 version, which isn't much inferior (and much
smaller!):
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/daisy.mp3
There's an updated, unaccompanied, somewhat shorter, version from later
work (text-to-speech project) at Bell Labs:
www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/languages.htmlwww.bell-labs.com/project/tts/daisy.aiff
[1] sometimes mispelt "Lockbaum"
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
