Cited on HN 5 times, 2015–2022, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
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.
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.
“Live demo at the Computer History Museum, of an IBM 1401 playing music via AM radio bus emissions.” (HN, 2018)
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]
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.
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]
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
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