By Nick Heath, 10 March 2009 11:17
The bleeps and beeps of the world's earliest computers are being crafted into electronic riffs for a 21st century music concert.
The codebreaking computer used in World War II, the Colossus Mark II, and vintage machines ranging from the 1960s' Elliott 803 through to the 1980s' BBC Micro - will sing again as part of the Obsolete project, which is using early computers to make electronic music.
In March musician Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8, will fuse the simple sounds produced by early computer hardware into tonal tunes in two concerts at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, home of the World War II codebreakers.
Applegate, who has worked with former Blur frontman Damon Albarn, hopes Obsolete will put the spotlight on the UK's computing heritage and the tech treasures within The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley.
Here Applegate shows off the Elliott 803 and its myriad buttons.
Photo credit: John Robertson
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1. anonymous
In the early 60's I was working on an EMIDEC computer at the first Barclays Bank Compouter Centre. This was the first transistor/core mainframe. We used to write music on this which could be played through the inbuilt speakers. Different tunes were primarily used to warn the operators of what the coming fault was. The highlight was writing Christmas Carols which were then broadcast on the Jack de Manio morning radio (the forerunner of the Today Programme) as a taste of what strange things computers could do.
I have been in the Computer Business since 1963 (after 5 years on electronics) working on communications, hardware and software for Emidec (ICL as it became) Univac, DEC (PDP 8,9,10 and Vaxes) ands IBM. Also building bespoke PC's and servers. I still work in the industry, nowadays mostly on AV and video conferencing. I still find it interesting. (This is purely a "by the way". I read your site avidly and find your older machines so great. I still have an Atari portable and an 800 just scrapped together with IDM XT and even a Miglo 300baud modem.
2. anonymous
1964 - Mothercare - I was a junior programmer and we had an IBM1440 on which we could write "tunes" which we played by putting a transistor radio on top of the CPU. We also could do rhythms on the 1443 oscillating print bar printer but they were nowhere as good as the rhythms you could get on the old chain printers! Still in the business - and you know something, there really IS nothing new in computing as this guy proves with his great idea which has been done ad nauseum before, and I do mean nothing new. All the technological progress we experience is a variation of what we had in those days - just faster and using more memory... and far less efficient.