80's bands who rocked the geek
If you're not an old-school computer person, you may not realize that a hard drive was not always something that came with a home computer.
When you turned on a Commadore 64, or a TRS-80, it just loaded up the entire operating system into RAM, and there you were, faced with a fresh system that looked exactly like it looked the last time you turned it on...no matter what you had done with it last time. I think my phone has more memory than my first computer.
I typed many many many basic programs into the computer for literally hours, watched their 10 seconds of output (OMIGOD! IT'S A CRUDE PICTURE OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE! AND IT ONLY TOOK ME 14 HOURS TO TYPE FROM RUN MAGAZINE!), and then they were gone forever when I turned them off.
Even having removable storage, like a disk drive, where one could SAVE programs for later was considered an incredible luxury to most home computer users.
But, the earliest computers had a way to read and write data: sound. You could shoot a program out the speaker jack, and read a program via the mic jack. Meaning you could store programs on...cassette.
Yes, cassette. I had games like the insanely hard (and really quite spooky) text adventure BEDLAM. The TRS-80 also had cartridges too...not sure about the C64.
So it's no surprise that some bands in the late 70's and early 80's got fascinated with the streams of clicks and beeps (most people know this well as the sound of connecting via dial-up), and the possibility of including them on an album, and making the data itself part of the album.
Suddenly, artists no longer had to be satisfied by including satanic messages backwards in the background...now they could encode computer programs that displayed things like this on the screen:
(Code in the song 'Thank You' on Scottish band Urusei Yatsura's 'Everybody Loves Urusei Yatsura' album, released on their own Oni records.)
And how did one get it on their computer? You had to tape the track on cassette and then figure out how to load it.
Anyway, this whole blog entry is really a neophyte's introduction to Kempa's really astoundingly cool and well researched post about computer programs on vinyl. By the way, I think I should say it's via Xblog.
Comments
err..concider this banter dude:
i have nothing witty to say about this entry other then,
though a truly sub-par musician, alannah currie could kick ami mann's ass any day of the week.
and here i refrain from the geek jokes.
(wee!)
Posted by: lala mandala | March 18, 2004 5:17 PM
Yup, my first computer, the TI 99/4a (16K of memory! Wooo!) had a shoebox-style cassette recorder for data storage. And for some reason TI thought you'd want to listen to the data loading, so when you loaded data the sounds would come through the TV speaker.
And it would take 20 minutes to load a program that was probably like 10K.
I never even thought about the idea of a band putting the sounds on a record though - that's actually pretty clever heh.
Posted by: S | March 18, 2004 6:48 PM
I still have 2 C64's, 2 1541 floppy drives, and a cassette drive.
"This program is 30k..hmm shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to load..."
I had forgotten the 50 page RUN magazine programs that didn't work half the time. Ahhh the days of my bedroom being 110 degrees from the heat of the 1541's....
Posted by: Bill | March 19, 2004 11:47 PM
Oh yes - the joy of spending like 12+ hours typing in the code for some worthless little game or something, checking your code twice, and realizing that somewhere, the magazine must have made a typo or something.
Posted by: S | March 20, 2004 3:09 PM