Somebody programmed a 65-year previous laptop to p...

The Programmed Knowledge Processor-1 (PDP-1) is maybe most recognizable as the house of Spacewar!, one of many world’s first video video games, however as the video above proves, it additionally works as an unlimited and really sluggish iPod, too.

Within the video, Boards of Canada’s “Olson” is enjoying off of paper tape that is fastidiously fed and programmed into the PDP-1 by engineer and Laptop Historical past Museum docent Peter Samson. It is the ultimate product of Joe Lynch’s PDP-1.music challenge, an try to translate the brief and atmospheric music into one thing the PDP-1 can reproduce.

As Lynch writes on GitHub, the “Concord Compiler” used to translate “Olson” to paper tape was truly created by Samson to play audio by means of 4 of laptop’s lightbulbs whereas he was a scholar at MIT within the Nineteen Sixties. He used it to recreate classical music, however it’ll work with ’90s digital music in a pinch, too.

“Whereas these bulbs had been initially meant to supply program standing info to the pc operator,” Lynch writes, “Peter repurposed 4 of those gentle bulbs into 4 sq. wave turbines (or 4 1-bit DACs, put one other method), by turning the bulbs on and off at audio frequencies.” The sign from every bulb is then downmixed into stereo audio channels, transcribed through an emulator and merged right into a single file that needs to be manually punched into the paper tape that is fed into the PDP-1.

It is a laborious course of for taking part in even the only of songs, however it’s value it to listen to Boards of Canada’s already nostalgic music from a fair older traditional laptop.