Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!amdahl!littauer
From: littauer@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Tom Littauer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computer noises (was Re: Cray architecture)
Message-ID: <26576@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>
Date: 4 Apr 88 15:39:06 GMT
References: <7762@alice.UUCP> <5029@nsc.nsc.com> <850@gethen.UUCP>
Reply-To: littauer@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Tom Littauer)
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 33

In article <850@gethen.UUCP> farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren) writes:
>
>My three fave computer noise stories:
>
>I.  The line printers used with some earlier IBM systems had (as many
> still do) bands of type which continuously rotated, with hammers that
> were fired when the appropriate letter came by.  By selecting the output
> carefully, you could get the hammers to fire at a fixed frequency, and
> by varying the output you could change this frequency.  The story goes
> that someone programmed the thing to play the Star Spangled Banner,
> with the added fillip that on the "Rockets' Red Glare" passage, all of
> the doors to the automatic tape drives would flip open.
>
> ... deleted for brevity ...
>
>Number one may be apocryphal, but sounds reasonable.

Back in days of yore, I had a copy of a preogram which would do the above
trick (minus the tape door geewhiz) for an arbitrary melody. Same for
the radio trick.

Just goes to show that there've been personal computers for years (at
least after midnight...)


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