The Programmed Data Processor-1 (PDP-1) is perhaps most recognizable as the home of Space War!, one of the world’s first video games, but so the video above proves that it also works as a huge and very slow iPod.
In the video: Boards of Canada’s “Olson” plays from paper tape carefully fed and programmed into the PDP-1 by engineer and Computer History Museum lecturer Peter Samson. It’s Joe Lynch’s finished product PDP-1.music project, an attempt to translate the short and atmospheric song into something the PDP-1 can reproduce.
Like Lynch writes on GitHubbecame the “Harmony Compiler” used to translate “Olson” to paper tape, actually created by Samson to play audio through four computer light bulbs when he was a student at MIT in the 1960s. He used it to imitate classical music, but it will soon also work with electronic music from the 90s.
“Although these lamps were originally intended to provide program status information to the computer operator,” Lynch writes, “Peter repurposed four of these lamps into four square wave generators (or four 1-bit DACs, otherwise put) by turning the lamps on and off at audio frequencies.” The signal from each lamp is then downmixed to stereo audio channels, transcribed via an emulator and merged into a single file that must be manually inserted into the paper tape fed into the PDP-1.
It’s a painstaking process to play even the simplest songs, but it’s worth it to hear Boards of Canada’s already nostalgic music from an even older classical computer.
#programmed #65yearold #computer #play #Boards #Canadas #Olson