eder@ssc-vax.UUCP (Dani Eder) (01/21/85)
> > We even knew if we had diagnostics in our compile by the sound of the > old 1132 printer....It had a different "rhythm.".....I remember talking > on the phone from home to a friend at the computer...in the background was > the printer ker-chunking out a listing for him.....I heard the > unmistakable tones of a diagnostic report, and told him he had better > fix his bugs and re-compile....He thought I was psychic! > Back in high school, we had an IBM 1620 that was just as old as I was. Someone had discovered that if you put an AM radio on the console near the typewriter, and tuned to the low end of the AM dial, you could hear all sorts of interesting noises. We never did figure out what caused them, but one guy wrote a program that would play songs, and after a while, you could tell what the computer was doing by the sounds it was making. It was lots of fun to be able to tell innocent bystanders "the printer will start in five seconds", and then have it happen. Dani Eder / Boeing / ssc-vax!eder / Ad Astra!(To the Stars!)
mkg@whuxlm.UUCP (Marsh Gosnell) (01/23/85)
When I was in school, an enterprising student did a project using our GE 415 and an AM radio. After discovering that different instructions caused the radio to produce different noises, he devised a method of executing the appropriate series of instructions to cause what he claimed to be recognizable speech to be received by the radio. By loading the entire memory of the machine (32K) with his program, he could get about 2 seconds of "output". Marsh Gosnell AT&T Bell Laboratories whuxlk!mkg
rsellens@watdcsu.UUCP (Rick Sellens - Mech. Eng.) (01/24/85)
It's not just old computers that make recognizable noises. The speaker in my IBM PC will pick up on cyclic bus activity and I found I could tell when my thesis project program (numerical stuff) moved from one section of the solution to another. The pitch of a quiet hum on the speaker would change. Before I figured it out there were a few late nights that I thought I was going insane! Rick Sellens UUCP: watmath!watdcsu!rsellens CSNET: rsellens%watdcsu@waterloo.csnet ARPA: rsellens%watdcsu%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
peterb@pbear.UUCP (01/25/85)
Back in high school, we had an old PDP-8E, and it to would make noises heard through an AM radio placed on the CPU. What was really wild was that there were programs floating around that would play music in 4 part harmony, and a music compiler that would take a "score" and compile it into the nesssecary instructions that created the sounds. We had lots of classic scores, such as Bethovens fifth, Fanfare for a common man, Bachs third(?) and a whole slew of others. We got a kick out of playing them when nothing else was due. Peter Barada ima!pbear!peterb
price@wxlvax.UUCP (Nathan Price) (03/04/85)
> When I was in school, an enterprising student did a project using > our GE 415 and an AM radio. After discovering that different instructions > caused the radio to produce different noises, he devised a method of > executing the appropriate series of instructions to cause what he claimed to > be recognizable speech to be received by the radio. By loading the > entire memory of the machine (32K) with his program, he could get > about 2 seconds of "output". > Marsh Gosnell AT&T Bell Laboratories whuxlk!mkg What about NEW computer noises?? I'm working on an Apollo DN300 node even as we speak -- I love it dearly, but the power supply is quite astounding in the noises it produces. Nothing quite like recognizable speech (THAT would be something). However, when I'm doing CPU-intensive stuff like number-crunching, it makes sounds almost like tropical birds... Nathan Price "For 'tis the sport to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard."
nather@utastro.UUCP (Ed Nather) (03/15/85)
> What about NEW computer noises?? I'm working on an Apollo DN300 node > even as we speak -- I love it dearly, but the power supply is quite > astounding in the noises it produces. Nothing quite like recognizable > speech (THAT would be something). However, when I'm doing CPU-intensive > stuff like number-crunching, it makes sounds almost like tropical birds... > Nathan Price > "For 'tis the sport to have the engineer > Hoist with his own petard." Unfortunately we have lost the tradition of including a "hooter" -- a speaker -- on the arithmentic unit of a computer, more's the pity. Years ago at the Rand Corp. there was a demonstration of a pair of computers with hooters -- the demo played "Aloha" in stereo, and a hula dancer on the display kept time (more or less). Rumor had it if you caught her in the navel with the light pen her grass skirt fell off, but the pen was not connected at the time ... probably apochryphal anyway. All of the code was written, of course, in assembly language. -- Ed Nather Astronony Dept, U of Texas @ Austin {allegra,ihnp4}!{noao,ut-sally}!utastro!nather