Judith Mopalia
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2015–2022
1:16 · 18K views · Feb 26, 2009
A one-minute demo at the Computer History Museum's IBM 1401 restoration lab, where a program makes the machine's radio-frequency interference play tunes on an AM radio.
HN cites it as the classic early example of a computer producing music through electromagnetic emissions, in threads on System Bus Radio and similar hacks.
5 comments from Hacker News
Awesome, the 2.0 decommissioning last week had scared. There's a spectacular variety of ways that music has been made in unconventional electromechanical ways--on the head motors of floppy drives 3.5", 5.25", and 8", on hard drive voice coils, scanner carriage motors, steppers wherever the're found in CNC devices, dot-matrix printheads, pulsed laser cutters, tesla coils, all the way back to radio interference generated by the IBM 1401 ( this video ). The 1401 video I actually saw in an older related HN submission; lots of comments linking out to different examples in these threads. Here are a couple, someone might be able to aggregate a bunch more: "Eye of the Tiger" played on a dot-matrix printer: [LINK] (2015, 62 comments) "Imperial March" on a single floppy drive: [LINK] (2011, 27 comments) Both the news site and original video of the second submission are lost to time, but luckily our saviour (of web content) Brewster Kahle has graced us with a copy in the Internet Archive.[1] The Wayback Machine also remembers a time when YouTube recommendations bore greater relevance--those on the archived video page from 2011[2] are entirely of videos of computer hardware music. Some might even still be up today. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] "Imperial March" was also what was played on the first incarnation of the Floppotron, with an impressively full sound from only two floppy drives ( [LINK] ). And perhaps related are those videos of the pleasingly periodic percussion of uncontrolled devices l
That's pretty impressive. Printer music goes way back, by the way. Here's a (low-quality) recording of a 1960s-era IBM 1401 mainframe playing the Blue Danube Waltz on a 1403 line printer: [LINK] And here's the 1401 playing tunes on a radio via RF interference from the core memory: this video Unfortunately the 1401 at the Computer History Museum isn't currently authorized for line printer music because the stress might destroy the print chain and they don't have a replacement.
Generating music via radio interference goes way, way back. The IBM 1401 (1960's era) could do this: this video It could also play music on the line printer by banging out the right sequence of characters. [LINK] Strangely, the 1401 radio music was later set to orchestra and released as a CD by an Icelandic composer: [LINK]
This technique goes back to the early days of computers. Here's a video of the IBM 1401 punch card computer (1959) at the Computer History Museum playing music on an AM radio: this video The same computer could also play music using the line printer: [LINK] I discuss how the line printer music worked here: [LINK]
Live demo at the Computer History Museum, of an IBM 1401 playing music via AM radio bus emissions. this video You can see the 1401 demo'd on Wednesdays and Saturdays -- although they don't do this in the regular demo, just read cards and print on the line printer.