1401 Movies, Music, Sounds, and Videos

References to orchestral music have been moved to Johann Johannsson ( Jóhann Jóhannsson ) & father Johann Gunnarsson

Dear Friends,

I have no clue how to "organize" this web page -

- suggestions cheerfully/greatfully accepted - Ed Thelen ed@ed-thelen.org

Table of Contents

1403 Printer Music - from Ron Mak

"Music" from a 1403 printer under control of a 1401 from Ron Mak - .mp3 files

- (about 0.4 to 2.5 megabytes each) - shortest to longest - Performance rights not worked out with ASCAP :-|

- All below known to work with Windows Media Player, one person reported that Nero Media Player did not work for them. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - 0.4 MegaBytes

Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head - 1.8 MegaBytes

Born Free - 1.2 MegaBytes

In Excelsius Deo - 1.6 MegaBytes

Blue Danube Waltz - 2.4 MegaBytes June 26, 2019 - Some of the above information was on the Computer History Museum web site but apparently removed. Dag Spicer discovered this on the Internet Archive web site. (archived by Internet Archive Feb. 6, 2006)

2019 for French TV

from Ron Mak, July 3, 2019

Today we successfully revived the IBM 1403 printer music at the Computer History Museum on the Connecticut IBM 1401 system! After getting past a few card reader checks and one mangled card, we managed to read in a few of my nearly 50-year-old punched card decks and played several songs that I coded way back in high school, including “La Marseillaise” (the French national anthem). I made two videos. The first video has the printer carriage in neutral, so the paper did not advance. The second video has the paper advancing, so you can see that the notes are “played” by the printer printing lines of text. Each line is gibberish, but the characters were tuned to the right frequency. http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/IBM1401/IBM1403/La-Marseillaise-carriage-neutral.mov

http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/IBM1401/IBM1403/La-Marseillaise-carriage-on.mov There were two versions of “La Marseillaise” in the boxes. We played the first version which, as you can hear, has a few coding errors. I must have corrected the errors with the version labeled #2. If so, I don’t know why I kept the bad version. Anyway, the museum’s 1401 staff has my two boxes of printer music card decks which they will reproduce and (I assume) make available to anyone else. There are several decks of Christmas music, since printer music was a good demo during December. Hard to believe that anything I did in high school is still entertaining today ... - Ron Ronald Mak http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/

Department of Computer Engineering

Department of Computer Science

Program in Data Analytics

San José State University

One Washington Square

San José, CA USA 95192 "On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage,

if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right

answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the

kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a

question." -- Charles Babbage, 1791-1871

World's first computer scientist

2019 from Robert Garner

1401ers, et al, For the first time we (adventurous souls :) played 1403 chain music today! :-))

Ron Mak dug out his two boxes of 1960s chain music decks, photo below, from which we duplicated and ran Clair de Lune, La Marseillaise (French National Anthem), and When Johnny Comes Marching Home.



The CT 1403 (w/ Don Manning’s newly manufactured chain) hammered out the songs to the delight of Frank King, Ron Mak, Carl Claunch, Pat Buder, Glenn Lea, Luca Severini, Dale Jelsema, Robert Garner, and Chris Eley, a documentarian visiting from Paris who is authoring a web series on technology for the TV channel ARTE.* 2019-1403Music.m4v Photo of Ron Mak’s 1403 music decks, 3/4’ths of them he transcribed himself in high school in Berkeley in the 1960s! (He’s also kept all the 1401 programs he wrote back then! :)

Thanks everyone for allowing this to happen! - Robert * Chris documentary will focus on "ways in which operators working on old mainframes found ways to play with their machines and use them towards surprising ends.” :) He recorded AM Radio music on Monday, the 1403 demo programs, the 729 tape exercise program, the 083 sorter, and the keypunches. I asked Frank to take on oath on a 1401 manual that we were OK running the 1403 music decks (something he has been willing to risk since we received Don Manning’s new chain (knowing we could always make another if this one broke :)

A Flury 1403 Printer Music e-mails of June 2019

From: Ronald Mak/SJSU < ron . mak @ sjsu . edu >

Subject: Re: IBM 1403 Music

Date: June 27, 2019 at 10:01:30 AM PDT

To: Robert Garner

CC: ...



1403 printer music fans,



Here’s what I found in my garage: one and a half boxes of card decks for 1403 printer music! See the attached photo.



I created these decks back during my high school years (a little while ago!) in Richmond, CA, and I had meticulously labeled them in my handwriting. There are many songs, most coded by me. (OK, I know now that it’s spelled “Bolero”, by Ravel.) We played them on the 1401 system in the basement of the administration building of the Richmond School District.



Several decks are labeled “Music (general program) Autocoder” which appear to be absolute decks of the player program itself. I don’t remember what the decks labeled “Frequencies (general notes deck)” are. They appear to be absolute decks of some other program.



I was quite the proto-computer-nerd back then and wrote many programs in FORTRAN, COBOL, and Autocoder, plus coding music decks. I am now an ancient computer nerd spreading my geekiness to unsuspecting students. Yes, I still have most of the card decks of those old programs, too, including programs I wrote in college. Punched cards were still very much in use after I graduated and started working in Silicon Valley.



I recall that it’s easy to code new song data decks. If you can read sheet music, you punch one note per data card indicating the key, the note (A, B, C, D, E, F, or G) and its duration (quarter, half, or full). We can figure it out again by looking at the old song data decks.



Yes, I can bring these cards to the museum on Monday for reproduction and playing on the printer. They appear to be in good condition.





– Ron

Ronald Mak http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~mak/

Department of Computer Engineering

Department of Computer Science

Program in Data Analytics

San José State University

One Washington Square

San José, CA USA “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage,

if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right

answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the

kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a

question.”

-- Charles Babbage, 1791-1871

World’s first computer scientist

--------------

Later Ron Mak wrote: "I should have figured it out just by looking at the card decks. To play a song, you need a card deck consisting of the music program, the frequency cards (which contain the line of characters that the printer must print to play each of the different notes in the song), and the card deck of notes for the song. "Some of the song decks are larger because they include the program cards and the required frequency cards. The smaller decks might include only the song notes, in which case you use the “general notes deck” which has all the frequencies the printer can produce. "I don’t think the music program is very complicated. I haven’t disassembled it, but I would guess that for each song, it builds a table of the frequencies and a table of the notes. Then it simply iterates through the notes and does table lookups of the frequencies to print the lines. The duration of each note determines how many times to print each frequency line. The real genius of the program was to figure out what characters to print in a line in order to generate a particular note. ------------------ Hello, Ron -- A few questions for you or the others on distribution: Do you know who the "genius" was who figured out the frequency print patterns? Was there some algorithm used or was it just trial and error? I'm guessing that for consistent notes, the print line must start printing from the chain "home" position each time -- can you confirm that and explain how that was done programmatically? I assume the frequency patterns are specific to a particular chain configuration (probably a standard AN or HN chain) -- can you confirm which? Do you have or do you know of a similar program/frequency deck that works with the later 1403-N1 printer, whose print train moves more than twice as fast and prints 1100 lines/min (vs. the 600 lines/min printers on the CHM's 1401s)? Could we possibly get a softcopy or hardcopy listing of your general program and frequency deck(s)? We may have a computer science intern attempt to adapt them to our 1403-N1 unless we can find that it has already been done. (Note: currently our 1403-N1 printer at TechWorks! is not connected to a mainframe -- it uses a homemade controller to print only from an input data file -- so our environment is somewhat different.) Thanks, Bob Lusch

TechWorks! volunteer

1401 RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) "music" "our" 1401 - probably *NOT* RIAA free ;-)) YouTube, Details here Also see Demo Programs.html #1401RFI-Music

Stan's videos and sounds - from Stan Paddock

added July 14, 2011, Bob Erickson demonstrating how to reproduce IBM punched cards using an IBM 513 reproducing punch. The video was shot, edited and published by Stan Paddock. The video was shot in the 1401 restoration room in the Computer History Museum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTrqtd8bR30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTrqtd8bR30 Stan Paddock doing his adlib presentation of "Data processing in the 1960's". The video was shot by Ron Williams. It was edited and published by Stan Paddock. The video was shot in the 1401 restoration room in the Computer History Museum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b48uiLsF19s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b48uiLsF19s The 1401 restoration group at the Computer History Museum received word there was a company in Conroe Texas that was still using an IBM 402 for their everyday business. We contacted the company, Sparkler Filters, and were invited down to visit. Ron Crane, Ed Thelen, Frank King and Stan Paddock went to Conroe Texas in June of 2010. This video is of that trip.

The video was shot, edited and published by Stan Paddock, shot on location at Sparkler Filters, Conroe Texas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iceB7rzlZm0 www.paddockdrayage.com/OneAtATime/IBM1401backinoperation-sorta.wmv an undated happy day -

- collection by Stan Paddock June 2010

Miscellaneous

Michael Mahon writes