Early Sound and Music

This goes way back: In the 1960s, long before many readers of this book were born, there were no personal computers (horrors!). Instead, we had mainframe computers, great big monsters taking up entire rooms, with a clutch of incantation-chanting priests hovering about, serving their every need. Humble users would submit "jobs" on decks of punched cards, which the priests would feed into card readers. The computer would execute the job and print out results, which would be placed in a little mailbox for the user to pick up later. Sometimes the turnaround time for these jobs was rather long; I remember one professor at UC Davis complaining that the campus computer center was so slow that it would be faster for him to drive to UC Berkeley, 60 miles away, submit the job, wait for its return, and drive home.

Anyway, these computers didn't have any video output it was just printers and card punchers in those early days. But the printers were unlike anything in use these days. They were rather like typewriters in that there were solid characters that were pressed onto an inked ribbon just over the paper. To achieve higher speeds, these printers used entire banks of such printing wheels, so that each column had its own dedicated printing wheel. This allowed an entire line to be printed in one step.

As these printers printed a page, they emitted a rough tone whose frequency depended on the number of hammers hitting the page on that line. A few hammers led to a high note; many hammers produced a low note. It did not take long for some bright young fellow to figure out how to formalize this process. And so, late at night, when the responsible adults were not around, you could hear the gravelly voice of the printer banging out great hits like "Swanee River."