DEC LAB-8/e (PDP-8/e) playing music

[n1cholson]

Interesting. I used to use a radio to determine if a program had crashed by listening to the pitches. If it generated a single pitch with no changes, the program was stuck in an endless loop. If the sound changed, you knew it was necessary to continue waiting.

[luzon83]

Why's the printer stopping at 1:33?

[iraeus]

@luzon83 The break comes from OS/8 (the machine's operation system) loading and interpreting the next directory data block from the RK05 disk. 

[eMGeeGFX]

Truly awesome video!

[Oguz286]

It's a great machine, but the question is...

can it run Crysis?

[thecooldude9999]

you know its hardcore when you blow a fuse trying to turn it on.

[DrCruel]

Wow. I haven't seen that printer for decades. Watching it in operation, I can actually remember the distinctive smell of that machine ...

[teedot]

Amazing, and this is coming from a present-day programmer.

Unfortunately being only 27, I never had a chance to work with any of this old equipment. Very very cool!

[eMGeeGFX]

@teedot, same here!

[ObiTrev]

Did that index say Maple [Leaf Ragtime]?

[coreybeaulieu666]

you can pick up the sound on am....ooooooh could i have soo much fun with that

[douro20]

Doesn't that work by manipulating the bits in one of the address lines such that the EMF generated comes out as music?

[kargaroc386]

I wonder if it would be possible to emulate that.

[spacehelmetforacow]

@kargaroc386 Probably not :( that only happens because this computer's clock speed is low enough it shows as an audible frequency in radio transmissions. Modern computers are too fast, all you get is pure, uncontrolled noise...

[504caveman]

wow toldaly cool i love old scool suff bro keep that old comuter palying musik all som

[rbarraud]

That's so good I am actually tearing up :)

Had an Electronics Austraila Mini-SC/MP in '77 ... made noises on AM radio also -- but nothing that beautiful :)

How many points from me? IT'S OVER 9000!!! ;-)

Keep up the good work!

[djtonyxxx5]

my dad has done the same thing at his age...

[Smonjirez]

"mini"computer :P

[phreakmonkey]

\m/ O.O

[16mmDJ]

Haha invention 13

C64 commercials.

[kingcrimson234]

amazing oldschool DEC there! but can it play crysis? ;)

[madamerotten]

This is how the term "Bach File" evolved.

[mima14031985]

At 0:50 today we would say "Haha! That was my PC's cheap "made in China" power supply :-)"

LOL

[Lasarabande]

This song was featured in an early computer game I played when I was younger (early 90s) It kills me now that I can't remember the name of the game! Thank you for an interesting video though :)

[electronman32k]

@Lasarabande was it treasure maths storm by any chance?

[milkkart]

@electronman32k heh, i had that game. still have the disc for it round here somewhere.

[SappinSentry]

Can someone tell me what these computers were even really used for back then?

I mean they're so primitive and stuff, I can't imagine what they could be really used for.

[DrCruel]

@SappinSentry When I was eight years old, I was sent to the local high school in my town as part of a special gifted students program. They had a low-end PDP-8/e (printout, punched paper tapes for storage, a board with dip switches for troubleshooting, and no monitor or tape drive) which I think at the time cost the school $10,000. There was only one student who knew how to use it, and I used to hang out with him.

I used it to play a text version of Lunar Lander on it. Very cool at the time.

[ElasticMinds]

@SappinSentry for serious business, taking over the world, launching missles, calculating mortgages, tax code calculations, and making music from the frequencies it generated.

[SappinSentry]

@ElasticMinds I lol'd

[frotz661]

This setup looks rather well-loaded. I'd love to play with it.

[douro20]

A tape drive, two hard drives, a floppy disk drive, a CRT monitor and a lab I/O station...

[douro20]

Oh...and is that a chain printer next to everything else?

[iraeus]

@douro20 It's a drum printer!

[iraeus]

@douro20 There is no floppy disk!

[douro20]

@iraeus

Oh, I'm sorry. I could had sworn I saw a floppy disk drive. I understand that the CRT is a vector type.

[sbalogh53]

One thing I really miss in modern computers are all the Blinking Lights. Most of the mainframe and mini-computer systems I worked on during the 1970s to 1980s had loads of mesmerizing lights. I suppose on today's super-fast systems, the lights would just be a fairly constant blur, so not much fun any more. Sometimes I miss the "good old days", but not too often. :)

[ElasticMinds]

@sbalogh53 im sure nobody wants to go back to programming with switches either. Editing on a PDP looks painful. having to load 2-3 different punch cards to edit a punch card in a different format. Makes my IBM XT seem like a breeze in comparison.

[sbalogh53]

@ElasticMinds I still vividly recall writing COBOL programs on coding sheets which then got punched onto cards by the "Punch Girls". The deck of cards would then be put into a physical queue on a large table outside the computer room to be run overnight. A single compilation and testing cycle would take 12-24 hours depending on what other jobs were in queue. I spent hours manually stepping through programs to make sure they were as correct as possible before submitting them onto the computer.

[OBSysteme]

Why is it older machines are always more fun ? they should at minimum restart making genuine 8-bit computers : P

[Desmaad]

Funny, Peter Zinovieff was doing stuff like this on a PDP-8/s back in the 60's. According to him, it was the first computer in private ownership.

[danny75461]

thats amazing it sounds as good as the Nintendo enertainment system

[ANARCHYdashTVdotCOM]

The birth of DEC silicon snake oil. If you had just learned to whistle tunes and do math in your head, you could of saved $18,000 in 1965 dollars, which is from $100,000 - $300,000 in 2010 dollars. Ah, paper. Cheap, requires no power, portable, expandable, lasts 100,000x longer than magnetic media, instant on, sortable, multilingual, handles graphics and color with ease, duplicatable, you can send messages on it.

[ElasticMinds]

@ANARCHYdashTVdotCOM and renewable, and safe from power bumps, emp waves, your mom dropping a magnet by the computer, etc. Things were made to last back in the day.

[kodai666]

Hearing Bach on any computer takes me back to a time of endless Commodore 64 commercials. I wonder if Commodore got the idea from a rendition done on the PDP's? Very cool to see, that you even use honest to goodness telex paper instead of plain old generic form feed. Good show.

[crusiatusblack]

You make art with a tressure, never get rid of that piece of history!

Beautifully done!

[cobrachoppergirl]

If this is a PDP 8, why is it lime green like a PDP-12?

[iraeus]

Because it's a lab/8e - a version with lab IO. It's the official color scheme. And it has the pdp12 floating point processor. It's like a pdp12 wihout a Linc inside :-)

[ScottieNiven]

Could someone expain how the music is broadcasted to the am radio?

[kellingc]

@ScottieNiven Here's an over simplified explanation: The shielding around the processors aren't that good - the program is effecting the processor's RF emissions much like mixer stage does in a radio. You have an osollator providing a stable signal, and then add a variable signal to that. Ever hear static crashes during lighting storms? This is a more controlled form of that.

[ScottieNiven]

Thanks!

[XtalQRP]

A similar technique was used by a program toproduce 'sound' (well, semi-controlled noise... of a sort!) from the zx81 micro computer. Users were instructed to place a MW transister radio 'close to the RF cable or monitor screen'.

Fascinating machine and video, I have a handful of PDP11/84 boards but alas! no machine to insert them into!

[AdmiralCreideiki]

Sounds quite impressive!

Bu, what was the piece that started at about 3:00? I've heard it before, but what is it?

Also, 'tis nice to see a LAB-8/e, I've not seen a LAB-8, only "normal" PDP-8's.

[ThisGuyFrritz]

I can tell you that both pieces you've heard were 2-Part Inventions written by Bach. The first #13 and the second is #8.

[AdmiralCreideiki]

@ThisGuyFrritz - Thanks! I knew I'd heard them before.

[autoxtl]

Most likely transcribed by a friend of mine who graduated Westwood High in 1975, who makes a mention of this music compiler in this Usenet group posting [alt.sys.pdp8], which can be found via: tinyurl: ye25qdg‬.

[websuspect]

@AdmiralCreideiki Classical Music. Brahms?

[AdmiralCreideiki]

@websuspect - Har har. Quite funny.

[ThisGuyFrritz]

I wonder if you've heard them on the Switched-on Bach Albums. I've used a piece from "The Switched-On Boxed Set" when I uploaded my last video on my former YT account. Unfortunately, like the WMG or even WORSE, the current copyright holders, Seredip, LLC, DELETED it and I got my 3rd strike. That's a warning to fans of Wendy Carlos's recordings. I have a link on my channel that brings you to a website of people leaving comments about that company.

[digivince]

Someone needs to play still alive with it and have the screen display the cake and all the other images in ASCII Art.

[suckerprod]

Great :) I havent seen these machines since i was a small boy. My father used these DEC machines at work. I was absolutly fascinated by them. He had also a radio just to hear the computer working, but music out of this... wow :D

[charleswesterman]

where's my printer

[grant2053]

HA! Nice one using a radio to hear the RFI from the processor as music XD

[AAVista]

WOW!!! A DEC PDP-8 put to use in the 21st century! A computer like that one was conceived just a year before I was born. I read a pretty good helpin of history about it ina TIME magazine and also in a classroom textbook while I studied in college.

Outstanding music! Ink tapes for that typewriter/printer are still around at Office Max but you got to take care of that historic gem of a computer!

[iraeus]

Thanks for the comment!

Currently I have two machines capable of running OS/8. And they're still getting more complete :-)

The TeleType uses standard ribbons. Can get/order them in every office shop around the corner :-)

[nwajoe]

That's awesome! I was just reading Steven Levy's book Hackers for the umpteenth time and wondered if there was any footage of a PDP in action. Thanks for sharing this.

[6364gg2]

3:00 awesome.

[kinglonewolf104]

Cool computer, and cool video :)

&eB

[carlpaulsen]

The beginnings of iTunes

[douro20]

He's using a hard disk for storage.

[astralentity]

lol i love the printer output like that

[stonerj0e]

he blew a fuse in the beginning ! :)

[Membrane556]

It's playing music via it's RFI.

[MisterCrash84]

A truely beautyfull machine you've got there. I'm hoping to get my hands on a pdp/8 lab soon, it's from February 1972 and is in storage at a local telecom center where i've worked.

[MasterTxJ]

must take a lot power. lol

[6364gg2]

I had one to run up a bill of 400$ a year alone! (The pdp1. I donated it.)

[PDP11GY]

Great and very impressive to me ! Nostalgia and als is memory to my DEC employee time 1977 where I also was involved to service PDP-8 systems. Super Video and great to see a PDP-8 is still under service. Thanks and have fun with your PDP-8 environment.

[AlecJB]

That is reallyawesome, thanks for sharing! :D

[giefuser]

The first time I ever saw a PDP it was a PDP-8/L that "played" music on an AM-radio :) It is awsome!

Thanks for sharing