Boing Boing: Symphony for old IBM mainframe
In 1964, an Icelandic IBM 1401 mainframe engineer figured out how to get the machine to emit beautiful, bassy notes, and composed a symphony for it. Now his son is touring the symphony with interpretive dance thrown in.
I’m blogging this for my husband David, who says he’s heard the symphony but may not have heard about the dance video that goes with it. He’s pretty deeply involved with the IBM midrange community, so the backstory may be familiar to him.
The dance video is a disappointment; the image above makes it look like it might be interesting but in reality it consists of a woman in a dark room with dark clothing rolling around on the floor, writhing, jerking spasmodically, and occasionally yipping like a chihuahua giving birth. The symphony is sonorous and interesting, but the dance performance didn’t hold my interest and I kept looking at other stuff with the music playing in the background.
[tags]IBM, dance, geek[/tags]
While it’s true I hadn’t seen the dance video … I did hear an original tape of an IBM System 360 playing music. The instructor who had the tape also said that, when they were decommissioning the schools old S/360, they had the computer play taps for itself.