The December 2012 theme for The Greater IBM Connection is ‘corporate history’, and Paul Lasewicz, IBM Corporate Archivist, will be sharing with us some of the highlights from IBM’s history.
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To follow up on the post about the IBM 1401 musical suite by a Scandanavian composer, here’s an anecdote with a Holiday twist from retired IBMer John Van Gardner, an early pioneer in the kinds of computer music that inspired that suite! This excerpt is from file #17.
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I had gotten interested in audio amplifiers when I built a high fidelity system in the navy. During my school on the 704 as I learned how to program it I got an idea about how to use it as a square wave generator. The 704 had four indicator lights on the console that could be turned on and off with program sense instructions. They were used to give a visual indication of the progress of the program. I keyed in a program using index instructions to turn sense light 1 on and off at different frequencies. I connected the output of the sense light to the microphone input of the PA system. The PA amplifier could not reproduce a square wave so the sound that came out sounded like a clean sign wave.
The IBM 704, introduced in 1954, was a large-scale computer designed for engineering and scientific calculations.
Some time later my daughter Joy received a toy xylophone with a songbook with simple one note songs like “Three Blind Mice” and some Christmas carols. I took the book to work early one morning and connected the output of sense light 1 to the microphone input of the PA system. I found the numbers to make the 704 play the musical scale. Jack Bellinger came in later and heard it. He showed it to Cal Jackson a Lockheed System Programmer and he modified the 704 assembly program to equate the scale note names to the numbers necessary to create that note.
A few weeks later in December 1957 we had a Christmas party in the programming area at Lockheed and Cal had made a tape that had all the Christmas carols from the little xylophone book on it. It would play all the songs then rewind and start over….
I always wondered if I was the first person to play music with a digital computer. I found the answer to that question when the internet came into being. There were quit a few people that did it before me but at least I did it independently.
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Paul Lasewicz, IBM Corporate Archivist
