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0 pointswhitten11y ago0 comments

As I recall, it was a radio that was tuned to the Kilohertz band. This was before the FCC was so careful about computers emitting radio waves. A computer that has a clock cycle measured in Kilohertz can emit radio waves in the Kilohertz band.

This makes "music" of a sort, especially when the program running does many things repetitiously. In the early days of computing, multiplication was implemented as repeated addition. Memory access also had a particular pattern of repetitive circuitry.

This provided a base repetition that humans recognize. When code was stuck in a loop, or repeatedly accessed the same range of memory locations, the operators could hear the pattern and know something was wrong.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

ansible11y ago

That reminds me of the time I was poking (literally POKE'ing) around with my TRS-80 Color Computer. I (somehow) had changed it to one of the graphics modes and then set the base address to the start of RAM.

So on the screen you could sort of see the BASIC stack, other important system variables, and even a squashed representation of the text console. So when it was sitting idle you'd see one kind of pattern, and running programs produced other kinds of patterns.

Fun times.

melloclello11y ago

I always thought that a something like this was how the computers on Star Trek worked.

"Computer! Run a level five diagnostic of the starboard nacelles!" bloop bloop bloop...

The foley artists did a pretty terrific job of using sound to differentiate between heavy computation, success, and failure etc. Makes me kinda wish my computer could play a minor third instead of just plopping up a dialog box when things go wrong.

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