Really off topic now... was: Re: Face down,nine-edgefirst(wherein all is revealed)

demiourgos at smalltalk.org demiourgos at smalltalk.org
Fri May 12 01:54:10 UTC 2000


On Thu, 11 May 2000, Peter Crowther wrote:

> 
> > From: Dan Ingalls [mailto:Dan.Ingalls at disney.com]
> > (now don't get me started on printer music ;-).
> 
> The system console on the 1900 series had a built-in speaker that clicked
> whenever a particular instruction related to a context switch was executed.
> We had a program that would play the Close Encounters alien theme on the
> speaker... if you ran it at a sufficiently high priority (and irritated all
> the users).

[snip]

When time-sharing came into vogue, I missed having the box right there 
so you could use it to debug programs.  Of course, today we have PCs
and workstations.  One of the things which interested me were experiments
people proposed to either wire the address lights on the console into an
oscilloscope with a bit of circuitry, or to drive an audio system.  In either
case, the idea was to learn more about the program being executed by 
seeing or hearing patterns.  Initially I imagine, this would be pretty tough.
But one could learn, I guess.  A bit like the displays in "The Matrix", albeit
at a lower bandwidth.

  --jtg

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