Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!att-ih!alberta!calgary!radford
From: radford@calgary.UUCP (Radford Neal)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computer noises (was Re: Cray architecture)
Message-ID: <1503@vaxb.calgary.UUCP>
Date: 30 Mar 88 20:22:04 GMT
References: <7762@alice.UUCP> <418@ole.UUCP> <3216@phri.UUCP> <1574@osiris.UUCP> <769@kaos.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Calgary, Calgary, Ab.
Lines: 21

In article <769@kaos.UUCP>, romkey@kaos.UUCP (John Romkey) writes:

> The Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1 (a personal computer before PC meant
> IBM) put out enough RF interference that it became popular among
> TRS-80 hackers to put a small radio next to the machine to listen to
> what it was doing. Some people tried to program them to play music
> this way...

I have a vague recollection back from when I was a first-year student
(1974) of someone demonstrating a program for the PDP-8 that played a quite
good rendition of some piece of music on a radio placed beside the 
CPU. In retrospect, this seems moderately unlikely, though not impossible.
Does anyone know whether such a program existed? Whether it was feasible?
I believe the machine had core memory, would that have helped?

If it existed, it must have been some hack... I recall the music lasting
at least 10 seconds, good enough to require 6K samples/second minimum, say
6 bits per sample, doesn't look like it fits in 4K 12-bit words... Maybe
I was duped... Then again, the machine did have a disk...

   Radford Neal