Someone Programmed A 65-year Old Computer To Play Boards Of Canada's 'olson'

The Programmed Data Processor-1 (PDP-1) is possibly astir recognizable arsenic nan location of Spacewar!, one of nan world's first video games, but arsenic the video supra proves, it besides useful arsenic an tremendous and very slow iPod, too.

In nan video, Boards of Canada's "Olson" is playing disconnected of insubstantial portion that's cautiously fed and programmed into nan PDP-1 by technologist and Computer History Museum docent Peter Samson. It's nan last merchandise of Joe Lynch's PDP-1.music project, an effort to construe nan short and atmospheric opus into thing nan PDP-1 tin reproduce.

As Lynch writes connected GitHub, nan "Harmony Compiler" utilized to construe "Olson" to insubstantial portion was really created by Samson to play audio done 4 of computer's lightbulbs while he was a student astatine MIT successful nan 1960s. He utilized it to recreate classical music, but it'll activity pinch '90s physics euphony successful a pinch, too.

"While these bulbs were primitively intended to supply programme position accusation to nan machine operator," Lynch writes, "Peter repurposed 4 of these ray bulbs into 4 quadrate activity generators (or 4 1-bit DACs, put different way), by turning nan bulbs connected and disconnected astatine audio frequencies." The awesome from each bulb is past downmixed into stereo audio channels, transcribed via an emulator and merged into a azygous record that has to beryllium manually punched into nan insubstantial portion that's fed into nan PDP-1.

It's a laborious process for playing moreover nan simplest of songs, but it's worthy it to perceive Boards of Canada's already nostalgic euphony from an moreover older classical computer.