Musical mainframes from the land of Bjork
Forty years ago Jóhann Gunnarsson, an IBM chief maintenance engineer in Iceland, discovered that he could coax sounds out of his IBM 1401 Data Processing System. The computer’s memory emitted electromagnetic waves that would be picked up by a radio receiver. By programming the memory in a certain way, the mainframe could play a tune. Gunnarsson made some recordings of the music, which were rediscovered by his son who put together a musical (including interpretive mainframe dance!). Wired has an in depth article on the story.
Response to the musical has been varied: New Age wibbling has plumbed undreamt-of depths says The Inquirer, while others have dubbed it somehow both epileptic and sensual.
Thanks to the Mainframe blog for a link to an MP3 sample of an IBM S360-40 playing a similar kind of tune.
Posted: July 11th, 2007 under Mainframe servers.
I heard even older ‘mainframe music’ as an 8 year old boy in 1957. I was taken to see SILLIAC at Sydney University and one of the programmers got it to play ‘Waltzing Matilda’ for me.
David
Comment by David Roth — July 11, 2007 @ 5:13 pm
I don’t know about the music, but the Virtual Universe Operating System link at the beginning of the MP3 sample page brought back a memory that might be appreciated by any old-timers who can remember the old 370 Linkage Editor.
Our sysprog had written a CLIST or a Wylbur exec or whatever that produced a link job to split a certain type of load module into separate parts, for what purpose I have long forgotten. The member names were formed by appending the letters of the alphabet to the original member name. The first test run went against the usual IBM default name, “GO”. Looking through the printout, he was startled to be informed by IEWL that “*** GOD DOES NOT EXIST BUT HAS BEEN ADDED TO DATASET”.
“Well, that answers *that* question” was his reaction.
Comment by Harvey Wachtel — July 11, 2007 @ 5:18 pm