>I'm kind of a newbie with computers (only been using them since the >Apple ][ >came out), but I read somewhere that operators at many installations >used to >keep an AM radio nearby the main system, and keep it tuned to the white >noise >made by the system. Supposedly they could tell alot about the state of
That's EM radiation from inadequate shielding.
>the >system from the various whistles and beeps that came out of the radio. >Of course, along time ago, I tried this with my first PC, but I don't >think I >ever heard one peep that had anything to do with the box.
It worked on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I think someone even wrote a music program based on it. The FCC has gotten fussier about shielding which is why it didn't work on your PC.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
C Pronunciation Guide: y=x++; "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon" x=x++; "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"
In article <327E6515.1...@aol.com>, MBerg...@aol.com wrote: > Michael Krell wrote:
> > Over in misc.writing.screenplays, someone wrote:
> > > The scientists who invented ENIAC felt that the computer was just not > > > that exciting to tv viewers so they surrounded it with blinking > > > lights, lights that had nothing to do with what was going on inside > > > the computer. the media loved it and blinking lights have been a > > > movie computer stable since.
> > Can anyone confirm this story? It sounds a bit urban-legendish to me.
It is urban legend as for as the ENIAC goes. However, Thinking Machines CM5 got lot of lights added for customer satisfaction, unless I'm misinformed. But that is a modern day machine.
Back in the age of ENIAC you really needed the blinking lights.
> This one I suspect is true..... I worked on an IBM 360 with tons o' > blinky lights. The lights were suppose to tell you: The PSW, the > register that was being accessed, and the real time clock. Of course > all this valuable information was useless if the system crashed because > little blinky lights got dead when dos computer goes dead.
No, you are wrong. First, the blinking lights can be used to debug a system by looking at the front panel of a running system which hangs. Second, the blinking lights tell the state of the machine at all time, including when it has stopped, so you can see what PC, PSW and all other stuff of the system when it has stopped. You don't loose that information because software crashes. The blinking lights don't have anything to do with your software. They are a part of the hardware!
Second, you seem to be ignorant of the fact that old hardware can be programmed via their front panels. And when you write a program that way, you also want to be able to check if you entered the program correctly, which means you have to be able to read the memory. After you have entered the program, a useful technique to debug programs are to single step them. You didn't really think that this feature popped up with gdb do you? And when you single step a program, you definitely wants to see what happens after each instruction, and viola, the blinken lights tell you.
Actually, the whole thread is silly. Anyone with half a brain should understand the value of those blinken lights when programming a bare system. Both as diagnostic aids, program development aids, and informational aids. -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@update.uu.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
In article <327EEE15.5...@bellsouth.net>, mfl...@bellsouth.net says...
>I'm kind of a newbie with computers (only been using them since the >Apple ][ >came out), but I read somewhere that operators at many installations >used to >keep an AM radio nearby the main system, and keep it tuned to the white >noise >made by the system. Supposedly they could tell alot about the state of >the >system from the various whistles and beeps that came out of the radio. >Of course, along time ago, I tried this with my first PC, but I don't >think I >ever heard one peep that had anything to do with the box.
We never monitored the computer with the portable radio but we did have a small radio that we would put on the top of the 360-30 processor when we had visitors. We had made up a bunch of card decks that we could read in and they would produce tones in the radio. We had some old traditional tunes and at Christmas we played Christmas carols on the thing. This was only to impress visitors and not used for monitoring the operation of the computer. And yes, coming from the "old" school of punch boards and wires, I still wonder about the registers in my pentium 100 with 32 MB of memory. Just my $0000.02 Ed
> It worked on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I think someone >even wrote a music program based on it.
Yep. I typed one of those in. I believe there were twenty-four subroutines, one for each pitch. The author had figured out that an empty BASIC statement took a certain amount of time to interpret, characters in a REMark a certain less amount of time, and whitespace less than that. With the proper combination of each in a FOR loop, you had an instant one-timbre synthesizer. It worst drawback was that there was no way to insert a rest.
> The FCC has gotten fussier about shielding which is why it didn't >work on your PC.
The FCC has always been fussy; the Model I was a fluke that got overlooked, IIRC. The Model III, which was what I had, was much better shielded - the music program was barely audible (though it helped to have the radio plugged into the same outlet).
The Model I's keyboard was the major source of the noise. If you put it on top of a radio, you could fill a concert hall with the sound.
In article <55nlth...@newstand.syr.edu> bi...@npac.syr.edu (Bill Thater) writes: >i'm gld to see someone else did the "flash the pretty lights" hack. as >a "glass castle" operator for a state agency, i wrote a S/360 hack to >flash the lights in pretty patterns for "showing off" to the tours.
There were many of these hacks for different reasons. At SAC Headquarters, we had to hack their RCA Spectra message switches to turn off the idle light on the front panel. Seems that most operating systems that do message switching tend to spend a lot of time in the idle loop....and when the Air Farce General in charge of the project first got a demo of the working system [switched messages from SAC bases around the world as well as to such locations as the Looking Glass airborne command post and the white house's comms center], he was annoyed at paying millions of dollars for a computer system which had its idle light on most of the time.
Suggestions that running batch jobs on the computer would be detrimental to it being able to handle a peak load of message switching on demand were obviously wasted on an uncomprehending intellect...so the operating system was hacked to run a very low priority task that did nothing more than turn the light out.
In article <55qgqm$...@eve.speakeasy.org> bri...@speakeasy.org (Brian Raiter) writes:
>The FCC has always been fussy; the Model I was a fluke that got >overlooked, IIRC.
You recall wrong. The FCC only got fussy as of September 1984 with two classes of electronic devices with clock speeds above 100 Mhz. The radiation and conducted energy limits were tighter for residential devices than for commercial devices (which could not be sold for residential use), but neither was quite as tight as the VDE limits....or the current FCC limits.
Initial enforcement of the Part 15 emissions standards was widely publicized within the engineering community as being at the retail level. Non-conformant consumer products were simply siezed (say, from Toys-R-Us in one case) and destroyed. If the device didn't have the FCC Part/15 compliance label on it, it was by definition non-conformant,,,but the penalties for falsely putting a label on a non-conforming device were pretty draconian.
Commercial equipment enforcement was expected to be by your competitors who had gone to the trouble of testing, modifying, and making their equipment legal. Any competent engineer can tell at a glance whether or not a given design is likely to be able to pass compliance.
> In article <327E6515.1...@aol.com>, MBerg...@aol.com wrote:
> > Michael Krell wrote:
> > > Over in misc.writing.screenplays, someone wrote:
> > > > The scientists who invented ENIAC felt that the computer was just not > > > > that exciting to tv viewers so they surrounded it with blinking > > > > lights, lights that had nothing to do with what was going on inside > > > > the computer. the media loved it and blinking lights have been a > > > > movie computer stable since.
> > > Can anyone confirm this story? It sounds a bit urban-legendish to me.
> It is urban legend as for as the ENIAC goes. However, Thinking Machines CM5 > got lot of lights added for customer satisfaction, unless I'm misinformed. > But that is a modern day machine.
> Back in the age of ENIAC you really needed the blinking lights.
> > This one I suspect is true..... I worked on an IBM 360 with tons o' > > blinky lights. The lights were suppose to tell you: The PSW, the > > register that was being accessed, and the real time clock. Of course > > all this valuable information was useless if the system crashed because > > little blinky lights got dead when dos computer goes dead.
> No, you are wrong. First, the blinking lights can be used to debug a system > by looking at the front panel of a running system which hangs. Second, > the blinking lights tell the state of the machine at all time, including > when it has stopped, so you can see what PC, PSW and all other stuff > of the system when it has stopped. You don't loose that information > because software crashes. The blinking lights don't have anything to > do with your software. They are a part of the hardware!
> Second, you seem to be ignorant of the fact that old hardware can > be programmed via their front panels. And when you write a program > that way, you also want to be able to check if you entered the program > correctly, which means you have to be able to read the memory. > After you have entered the program, a useful technique to debug programs > are to single step them. You didn't really think that this feature popped > up with gdb do you? > And when you single step a program, you definitely wants to see what > happens after each instruction, and viola, the blinken lights tell > you.
> Actually, the whole thread is silly. Anyone with half a brain should > understand the value of those blinken lights when programming a bare > system. Both as diagnostic aids, program development aids, and > informational aids. > -- > Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus > || on a psychedelic trip > email: b...@update.uu.se || Reading murder books > pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
---------------------------------------- The thread started about blinken lights that had nothing to do with what was going on inside the computer. Who is ignorant?
bri...@speakeasy.org (Brian Raiter) wrote: >Gene Wirchenko <ge...@mindlink.bc.ca>: >> It worked on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I think someone >>even wrote a music program based on it. >Yep. I typed one of those in. I believe there were twenty-four >subroutines, one for each pitch. The author had figured out that an >empty BASIC statement took a certain amount of time to interpret, >characters in a REMark a certain less amount of time, and whitespace >less than that. With the proper combination of each in a FOR loop, you >had an instant one-timbre synthesizer. It worst drawback was that >there was no way to insert a rest. >> The FCC has gotten fussier about shielding which is why it didn't >>work on your PC. >The FCC has always been fussy; the Model I was a fluke that got >overlooked, IIRC. The Model III, which was what I had, was much better >shielded - the music program was barely audible (though it helped to >have the radio plugged into the same outlet). >The Model I's keyboard was the major source of the noise. If you put >it on top of a radio, you could fill a concert hall with the sound.
Well, yes, of course. The keyboard was the computer. CPU and 16K of memory were inside.
Sincerely,
Gene Wirchenko
C Pronunciation Guide: y=x++; "wye equals ex plus plus semicolon" x=x++; "ex equals ex doublecross semicolon"
> >I'm kind of a newbie with computers (only been using them since the > >Apple ][ > >came out), but I read somewhere that operators at many installations > >used to > >keep an AM radio nearby the main system, and keep it tuned to the white > >noise > >made by the system. Supposedly they could tell alot about the state of
> That's EM radiation from inadequate shielding.
> >the > >system from the various whistles and beeps that came out of the radio.
> It worked on the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I think someone > even wrote a music program based on it.
In Mike Cringely's tv documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" (its topic was the rise of the personal computer) they told about a guy who wrote a program to an Altair which, when you placed a transistor radio on it, played "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles.
-- Good wishes, Peter Liljenberg <c96pe...@und.ida.liu.se>
> In Mike Cringely's tv documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" (its topic was the > rise of the personal computer) they told about a guy who wrote a program to > an Altair which, when you placed a transistor radio on it, played > "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles.
Steve Dompier was the programmer's name. His article describing the effect appears in volume 1 (1976) of Dr. Dobb's Journal if you want to read the full story.
[BTW, it's Robert Cringely, not Mike, and it's actually a pseudonym that's been used by several InfoWorld writers over the years. This particular Cringely was (a few months ago) actually being sued by the magazine for using the name on TV without their permission]
> [BTW, it's Robert Cringely, not Mike, and it's actually a pseudonym > that's been used by several InfoWorld writers over the years. This > particular Cringely was (a few months ago) actually being sued by > the magazine for using the name on TV without their permission]
Well, he sure fooled me :) He put on a good show of being a failed hacker in Silly Valley, though. What's the state of the world when you can't trust TV? <manic grin>
-- Good wishes, Peter Liljenberg <c96pe...@und.ida.liu.se>
Peter Liljenberg wrote: > In Mike Cringely's tv documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" (its topic was the > rise of the personal computer) they told about a guy who wrote a program to > an Altair which, when you placed a transistor radio on it, played > "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles.
Altair? I heard that hack on some IBM system (I don't remember the model, but I do remember that it repeated about 10 seconds of Bach) when my high school math class toured a computer center in 1965-66, and I'll bet it wasn't exactly a new idea even then.
Gene Wirchenko wrote in article <55p5sl$...@fountain.mindlink.net>:
> The FCC has gotten fussier about shielding which is why it > didn't work on your PC.
Oddly enough, the "dirtiest" system in the house now (other than my ISC 8001) is my wife's brand new 200MHz Gateway box. When that machine's on, it's impossible to use my shortwave radio in the next room. By contrast, my -11s and Novas are quite "quiet"; I have to get a radio quite close to the systems - and they use core memory!
The ISC, by the way, can (and did, until I "shielded" it with an application of aluminium foil on the case insides) jam commercial television at about 25 feet.
Cheers. -- ______________________________________________________________________ | | | | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:carl.fri...@cliff.swec.com | | | http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum | ICBM: N42:22 W71:47 | |________________________________________________|_____________________|
: First, the blinking lights can be used to debug a system : by looking at the front panel of a running system which hangs. Second, : the blinking lights tell the state of the machine at all time, including : when it has stopped, so you can see what PC, PSW and all other stuff : of the system when it has stopped. You don't loose that information : because software crashes. The blinking lights don't have anything to : do with your software. They are a part of the hardware!
I remember that the lights on our dearly departed DECsystem-10 were useful for a number of things, in particular the counter that was incremented by the null job was displayed in one 36 bit (naturally) line of lights. You could instantly tell how busy the system was by seeing how fast this number was increasing....
Now onto a slightly different use for the lights (more particulaly a register attached to lights on the console). I was involved with a group of students employed as night-time operators/Help Desk support. Well, there wasn't too much to do so we read everything we could - in particular, about the UUO that set the console lights register, and the corresponding UUO to read it. Given that our exclusive group was less than 36 strong, we allocated a bit in this register to each of us, and had a program run at login time to see who was logged in. This worked fine for a couple of years until we found out that our on-site DEC engineer had been working many hours a week to discover why the console lights display was 'playing up'. We quietly killed the program and the problem went away.... -- Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Dav...@latrobe.edu.au Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479 1999 La Trobe University | "My Alfas keep me poor in a monetary Melbourne Australia 3083 | sense, but rich in so many other ways"
> Does anyone here know who got the word 'TILT" to display on the >PDP-10 panels? I've heard this one a few times here, but never saw >it attributed to anybody. > I suspect it could have been done fairly easily on the center top >panel... If only I had a -10 to play with...
I'm not so sure. I may well have considered that, but it would have been a little tricky. As I recall it displayed the 64 bit math result, the parity register which all code and data visited, and I forget what else. I certainly never tried, so I won't say it was impossible (or even difficult).
OTOH, I *did* write a program that displayed TILT on a PDP-10 peripheral. That was pretty easy - it was a 16x16 bank of lights showing the state of the audio processing box we built. My program was pretty short (was it 57 instructions? Something near there.) Of course, that included the system call to give me access to the I/O instructions I needed and the code to make two 3-bit worms run around the lights at random until the collided (whereupon I flashed TI LT a few times and restarted).
Back on that post that claimed the IBM 360's lights were useless when the system crashed, before TOPS-10 was called TOPS-10, it's crash code was simply a HALT instruction. The PC was still in the lights and was very valuable. We talked about hooking up a siren to the RUN light to get the operator's attention (HALT turned off the RUN light). Fortunately the STOPCD macro came out in the 5 series OS that ran the CTY bell several times and printed the 3 character stop code. -- <> Eric (Ric) Werme <> This space under reconstruction <> <> <we...@zk3.dec.com> <> <>
Andrew Rogers <rog...@hi.com> writes: >Peter Liljenberg wrote: >> In Mike Cringely's tv documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" (its topic was the >> rise of the personal computer) they told about a guy who wrote a program to >> an Altair which, when you placed a transistor radio on it, played >> "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles. >Altair? I heard that hack on some IBM system (I don't remember the >model, but I do remember that it repeated about 10 seconds of Bach) >when my high school math class toured a computer center in 1965-66, >and I'll bet it wasn't exactly a new idea even then.
Nowhere near "new". By the 60s playing music through a nearby radio was a standard open-house demo. There were also programs that would play music on the line printer, using the patterns of hammer strikes to provide the different tones.
And the TX-0 computer (of Lincoln Labs fame) included a hi-fi amplifier built into the console, with the sign bit of the accumulator tied to its input.
On 5 Nov 1996 20:27:36 GMT, wri...@sabu.ebay.sun.com wrote:
>--------------------------- >The original post said that the ENIAC designers were thinking >about TV viewers. There was no commercial TV in the US until after >WWII. No one owned TV sets during the NY Worlds Fair. >Sabu
Maybe it applied to movie newsreels too, which were around since WW I.
In article <328226A3.4...@hi.com>, Andrew Rogers <rog...@hi.com> wrote: > Peter Liljenberg wrote: > > In Mike Cringely's tv documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" (its topic was the > > rise of the personal computer) they told about a guy who wrote a program to > > an Altair which, when you placed a transistor radio on it, played > > "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles.
> Altair? I heard that hack on some IBM system (I don't remember the > model, but I do remember that it repeated about 10 seconds of Bach) > when my high school math class toured a computer center in 1965-66, > and I'll bet it wasn't exactly a new idea even then.
> Andrew
This is OLD stuff. The IBM 1620 (c. 1965) had music programs that worked quite well. Since the 1620's crystal clock was a whopping 1Mhz (divided by 20 for memory cycle time) one could take an ordinary AM radio (guess where it was tuned to) and with proper placement you could get music.
Later in my computing career, when micro processors came out, the 1620 (now later in life, the 70's) was used as a comparison point for intel's first microprocessor (the 4004). The 1620 we played around with, we did some probing around, and found out that direct connection to various lamps on the front panel (which it had many) gave "interesting" renditions of tunes, each a bit different in sound. Since we could now "pick" out instrument, and wanted to display them, we wired up the "register select" rotary switch to both light a light and select the proper light to "observe". It worked out quite nicely.
Now for the fun part... When intel wanted to make comparison photos for the 4004 and "something else" it used this 1620 (I now own the machine) and yes, the pictures do have the "music register" nicely lettered if you look hard. The pictures appeared in Business Week in the early 70's. I don't know the exact issues, but they were probalby in the 1972-73 time frame. If anyone has the exact issue date, I'd like to know, as I've lost the exact issue (but did see it in passing).
Wonderful folklore....
-- Tom Watson t...@3do.com (Home: t...@johana.com)
In article <tsw-0811961318020...@cypher.3do.com> t...@3do.com
(Tom Watson) writes: >This is OLD stuff. The IBM 1620 (c. 1965) had music programs that >worked quite well. Since the 1620's crystal clock was a whopping >1Mhz (divided by 20 for memory cycle time) one could take an ordinary >AM radio (guess where it was tuned to) and with proper placement you >could get music.
Interesting. The one I saw asked to have the radio tuned to 580 kHz.
Also, this machine had a 2311 disk drive, and the program would step the heads in time with the music.
Being the pack rat that I am, I probably still have the printout around somewhere...
Charlie_Gi...@mindlink.bc.ca I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
> Back on that post that claimed the IBM 360's lights were useless > when the system crashed, before TOPS-10 was called TOPS-10, it's > crash code was simply a HALT instruction. The PC was still in > the lights and was very valuable. We talked about hooking up a > siren to the RUN light to get the operator's attention (HALT turned > off the RUN light). Fortunately the STOPCD macro came out in the > 5 series OS that ran the CTY bell several times and printed the 3 > character stop code.
Back where I held employment at my first "day job", the monitor level was such that we had "real" stopcodes, and an LA-36 bell sequence that sounded remarkably like the Morse Code "SOS".
In recognition that light patterns left over after a crash, or most especially, a hang, we also had a Polaroid camera that was used to record the contents of all the lights (which, by the time I resigned for other things, had been mostly replaced with LEDs).
The funniest part of it was that some wag had hooked the speaker output to an old automobile-theft alarm that featured a pager. If a system crashed, the pager went off. Of course false alarms were a large problem with the system...
-- ______________________________________________________________________ | | | | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:carl.fri...@cliff.swec.com | | | http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum | ICBM: N42:22 W71:47 | |________________________________________________|_____________________|
In article <328226A3.4...@hi.com> rog...@hi.com (Andrew Rogers) writes: >Peter Liljenberg wrote:
>> In Mike Cringely's tv documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" (its topic >> was the rise of the personal computer) they told about a guy who >> wrote a program to an Altair which, when you placed a transistor >> radio on it, played "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles.
>Altair? I heard that hack on some IBM system (I don't remember the >model, but I do remember that it repeated about 10 seconds of Bach) >when my high school math class toured a computer center in 1965-66, >and I'll bet it wasn't exactly a new idea even then.
Indeed. I first saw it on an IBM 1620 in 1967, and wrote one of my own for the Univac 9300 a few years later.
My favourite from the standpoint of a clever hack was the one that ran on my IMSAI (it would work on an Altair too) where you fed the "interrupts enabled" line to an audio amplifier through a suitable shaping circuit. It wasn't radio pickup anymore, but the program could toggle the line in fancy enough patterns to play three-part harmony. Quite impressive.
Charlie_Gi...@mindlink.bc.ca I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
The first 'music recital' by a computer is generally attributed to Max Mathews of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. Mathews was working on computer generated speech for use in testing new telephone inventions by simulation.
In 1957 a computer at Bell 'sang' the song _Daisey Bell, A Bicycle Built for Two_ which was later made famous in _2001_ and recreated by Dompier on the Altair. Several of these early experiments were recorded on Decca DL 79103.
Does anyone know what hardware was used to play _Daisey_?
In the late '50s Mathews did a great deal of work on computer generated music. He wrote a program called MUSIC IV for the IBM 7094 to synthesize sounds. MUSIC V ran on a later IBM.
Another project at Bell was the GROOVE system which ran on a Honeywell DDP-224.
>>Peter Liljenberg wrote: >>> an Altair which, when you placed a transistor radio on it, played >>> "Fool on the Hill", by the Beatles.
>>Altair? I heard that hack on some IBM system (I don't remember the >>model, but I do remember that it repeated about 10 seconds of Bach) >>when my high school math class toured a computer center in 1965-66,
>Nowhere near "new". By the 60s playing music through a nearby radio
>And the TX-0 computer (of Lincoln Labs fame) included a hi-fi amplifier >built into the console, with the sign bit of the accumulator tied to >its input.
BTW, how about the LED digits on the front panels of Intel-based machines, which allegedly show you the speed the machine runs at (not that I understand why someone would want to run their machine at less than the highest safe speed) - are those hard-wired or somewhat more sophisticated? --Dan.
In article <561pmh$...@learnet.freenet.hut.fi>, d...@mail.freenet.hut.fi
(Dan Bernstein,Rehovot Israel) wrote: > BTW, how about the LED digits on the front panels of Intel-based
machines, which allegedly show you the speed the machine runs at (not that I understand why someone would want to run their machine at less than the highest
> safe speed) - are those hard-wired or somewhat more sophisticated? > --Dan.
On most machines (ALL that I've seen!), the display is set to display one number on TURBO, another number on NON-TURBO. So, as you can guess, the display has not much to do with what the processor actually does.
I was setting up a system for one customer, where we were waking up an old 286-10 to serve as a print server. The new case he ordered had a VERY involved jumper setup for the display. We ended up with the case saying "120MHz" ... <B-)
RwP
-- Ralph Wade Phillips, CET #LA-82 ral...@gcstation.net
Charlie_Gi...@mindlink.bc.ca (Charlie Gibbs) writes: >My favourite from the standpoint of a clever hack was the one that >ran on my IMSAI (it would work on an Altair too) where you fed the >"interrupts enabled" line to an audio amplifier through a suitable >shaping circuit. It wasn't radio pickup anymore, but the program >could toggle the line in fancy enough patterns to play three-part >harmony. Quite impressive.
The PDP-1 at MIT was wired to a Heath amplifier by taking the sense light lines from the machine and running them through a homebrew mixer. Pete Sampson wrote a *very* nice music compiler for it; the input (via -ugh- Flexowriter tape) could almost be transcribed directly from a score. His program could handle three parts, and was not limited by memory (it would read the paper tape input as required, without interrupting the output).
Not surprisingly, it couldn't produce the quality audio output that comes from today's sound cards, but in its day (the early 1960s) the result was quite impressive.
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