DOCSLIB.ORG

Computer in French

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Computer in French Volunteer Information Exchange Sharing what we know with those we know Volume 5 Number 8 September 11, 2015 Contribute To The VIE Links You Might Enjoy Long before the Neiman-Marcus “Kitchen Computer” and before any recipes on your PC, there was ECHO • Creation of Evans and Sutherland IV, a one-off home computer. Dave Cortesi writes a • 10 Pictures of PCs in schools in the 80's wonderful article describing this one-of-a-kind artifact. • Computer Art in 1969 Bill Worthington writes of his opportunity to visit the University of Manchester and the reconstructed • In Memoriam: Karl Taub, who started the Computer “Baby.” And he took some excellent pictures for us. Science departments at Carnagie Mellon and Columbia Universities in the 70's. Thanks once more to Chris Garcia for telling us about three recent acquisitions. • Ed Thelen sends along this link about the Librascope LGP-30. As always, send us your stories, anecdotes and adventures in computing. • Kate McGregor sent this link about the several Jim Strickland [email protected] archiving activities at Cisco iwhich the CHM is leading. • Happy 17 th birthday, Google—Sept 4 CHM Blog Ken Shirriff has written several excellent and detailed Recent CHM Blog Entries articles recently about the innards of the 1401. Kirsten Tashev keeps us up-to-date on new CHM blog • 1402 Operations entries. • Details on 1401 Qui-Binary arithmetic • Guest blogger, Adam Spring writes on Amiga • 1403 Print mechanism – explanation and animation Computing. The Amiga computer celebrated its 30th birthday at CHM this July. • 1401 Core Memory Operation Peter Hart will speak on “Making Shakey, the World's Docent Training: Women In Computing First Intelligent Robot on September 14. Click for Kate McGregor Aug 8 details. This fall we will be “gearing” up for festivities celebrating the life, work and creativity of Ada Lovelace, and I am excited to announce a new training Contents program open to all qualified CHM docents! Contribute To The VIE 1 Exact dates and details will follow, but please let us know now if you would like to join our Women in CHM Blog 1 Computing tour team by signing up using the online Docent Training: Women in Computing 1 form below: Links You Might Enjoy 1 Interest in Women in Computing Tour Training - Fall 2015 Peter Hart Speaks on Shakey 1 Training: Women in Computing Tour First Home Computer 2 Eligibility: CHM Qualified Docents Only Visit to the Manchester Baby 4 Time Frame: October/November 2015 Training Format: 3 classroom sessions and a Recent Acquisitions 5 qualification process Computer in French 5 Location: CHM We know our visitors will be excited to learn more “Ugliest Man on Campus” 6 about Ada and other incredible women of the Coming Events 6 computing era! Please contact Kate directly with any questions. 1 The First Home Computer “Simple keyboard entry and printer output routines DAVE CORTESI were the first ECHO programs the Sutherlands wrote. These were followed by the paper tape Like many dedicated engineers, Jim Sutherland couldn't input and … punching routines... Jim is now resist the urge to take his work home with him. But devoting his time to writing such programs as Sutherland wasn't just any engineer: he worked for multiply, divide, multiple precision add, subtract, Westinghouse designing computers and nuclear power and message writer routines.” plant control systems, and over the course of a 38-year career won 25 patents. So when in the mid-1960s he This shows that in 1968, Sutherland was still writing very decided to take some work home, the result was a full- basic system control functions, and the ECHO IV was a scale computer in the family basement, and very likely long way from being able to order groceries. the first-ever home computer. The ECHO IV did eventually become integrated into the In 1959, Sutherland Westinghouse built household. When a computer called Sutherland the PRODAC IV, a described the machine for which system to a Sutherland meeting of the designed the ALU Pittsburgh section (Arithmetic and of the IEEE in Logic Unit). In 1994[3], he said 1965, Westing- that besides the house bought in a keyboard, teletype Univac design for a and paper tape process-control unit next to the computer to sell as machine, there the PRODAC 50. was an IBM The PRODAC IV Selectric was decom- typewriter in the missioned and its kitchen that could parts were made be used as a surplus. word-processor, Jim Sutherland, in his basement, checks the status lights on the and a numeric Sutherland, who ECHO IV console. keypad in the knew the PRODAC living room that IV technology was used to instruct the ECHO to rotate the TV antenna intimately, asked permission to take home the boards to best receive a particular channel. (Hands up if you and memory to experiment with a home computer, and remember TV antenna rotators!) his employers agreed. The parts were signed out on indefinite loan, and Sutherland began to build the The ECHO also had connections to four “BCD clocks” Electronic Computing Home Operator, or ECHO IV (the around the house. These BCD (binary-coded decimal) “IV” was a tribute to his old work project). clocks are mentioned in two articles, but alas, no pictures were published. They seem to have been an earlier As built, the ECHO IV occupied four bays approximately Sutherland project, and apparently read out the time as 2x2x6 feet each[1], and generated enough heat that binary, four small lights per digit. Sutherland's son Sutherland had to install an exhaust fan to cool the recalled that “after Dad explained that three lights in a basement (the machine drew 3.5KW). By the summer of row meant seven, I could easily tell when it was 7:00 or 1968, the ECHO IV was working well enough that the 7:07...” The clocks apparently updated the minutes value Westinghouse PR department publicized it to local independently. However, when the BCD clock on the media. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette did a story featuring Sutherland's bedroom ceiling approached the hour (one a delightful photograph of the Sutherland family gathered supposes, reading out “○●○●, ●○○●”), it triggered the around the computer (see the picture gallery[0]), which ECHO IV in the basement to power up, run a self-test, was fancifully supposed to be able to order groceries and then update the hour value of all four clocks before predict the weather. powering-off again. Popular Mechanics did a feature story[2] that explored at What was the ECHO IV's technology? It was the same length the useful things a home computer might do when as the PRODAC IV from which all its parts came, but that properly programmed. However, this story contains a computer seems to have evaporated from history, or at paragraph that tells volumes to any programmer about least, from the internet. CHM has some items related to the state of ECHO IV programming: 2 the PRODAC 50, the Univac-designed machine that sent The dominant theme here is functional blocks with 5 the PRODAC IV out to pasture and made its parts groups of 3. There are four such blocks headed TR, ZR, available to Sutherland, but nothing earlier. AD and XR. Without access to the documentation[5] we The ECHO can only guess that the “R” in these names means plug-in “Register”. We still can't know the memory word size, but modules, with it almost surely was not a multiple of 4 bits. Very likely it their was some multiple of 3 bits (one octal digit), possibly 15 distinctive bits or 5 octal digits. gold-toned All sources say the machine had a repertoire of “18 extraction instructions”. However, the lower right of the display handles and panel has lights and names for sixteen instructions, not brown circuit eighteen. (The names shown are AND, EOR, ADD, STA, boards JAZ, JAN, INP, OUT, ENA, ENB, SIP, DCS, COM, JOV, populated JMP and HLT.) Anyone who has done assembly- with little green boxes, are familiar to CCARP volunteers language programming can probably intuit what most of who have cataloged over 100 of them, apart from the those mean. Conspicuously absent is any opcode that hundreds more still resident in the ECHO IV cabinets sounds like “load accumulator,” so there may well be now housed in Milpitas. But what is hiding in the green- more instructions than listed. In any case, there's no covered sub-modules? Some have speculated that they indication that Sutherland ever implemented a symbolic were potted reed-relays. assembler, let alone any higher-level language. So the However, ECHO would always have been programmed by entering on some the octal digits of its machine language, and debugged of the by single-stepping the program while reading out the boards the lights (see the INST STEP position under MODE). green Despite its rudimentary technology, the ECHO IV caps have ultimately did function as a household computer, at least fallen off to the extent of being some fashion of a word processor, or been a TV antenna aimer, and a clock manager. It kept the removed Sutherland basement comfortably warm from 1965 until and we can see the contents of the sub-modules. Each is 1975, when it was donated to the Boston Computer a plastic frame that holds one transistor and a cluster of Museum, and eventually made its way to CHM and the resistors and capacitors in a vertical “cordwood” Milpitas warehouse where it can be examined today. arrangement. (Control Data used “cordwood” stacked Notes and Links components in the CDC6600 line; there are a number of those modules in the collection.) [0] A gallery of ECHO IV pictures: https://cortesi.smugmug.com/Other/ECHO-IV-article So the ECHO IV was a discrete-transistor machine.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • What the Past Teaches Us About Optimal Product Development
    WHITE PAPER | AUGUST 2020 What the Past Teaches us about Optimal Product Development The Study of Goal Definitions and Managing Hierarchical Systems Trade-offs. The Market Leader in Mechatronics and Detailed Design Service | simplexitypd.com INTRODUCTION Development of products that involve firmware, electrical and mechanical engineering can get complicated. There can often be seemingly conflicting priorities related to hierarchical product requirements, cost, or development timeframes. This complexity is nothing new. In this paper, we will break down or decompose how to manage the tradeoffs between these systems, but first, we will review this process through the lens of the development process of the DEC-PDP-1 personal computer (circa 1960) as a history lesson in optimal product development. THE FIRST PERSONAL COMPUTER In 1960, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) released the PDP-1 personal computer. When the machine was released, it was a stellar achievement of cost / performance optimization. This machine was quite small compared with the “mainframes” of the day, behemoths that occupied entire rooms and were serviced by a “priesthood” of operators who fed in punched cards, mounted magnetic tape reels, and tore off reams of paper that came from the printers. The PDP-1 by contrast was meant to be a “personal computer,” operated by technical folks directly interacting with its front panel and other peripherals. Many consider this machine the first personal computer, as it needed no special room, no special air conditioning, no special power wiring, and no specially trained operators. The PDP-1 could add two 18-bit numbers in 5 microseconds. And it had a (core) memory of 4K 18-bit words.
    [Show full text]
  • UC Berkeley Previously Published Works
    UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Building the Second Mind, 1961-1980: From the Ascendancy of ARPA-IPTO to the Advent of Commercial Expert Systems Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ck3q4f0 ISBN 978-0-989453-4-6 Author Skinner, Rebecca Elizabeth Publication Date 2013-12-31 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Building the Second Mind, 1961-1980: From the Ascendancy of ARPA to the Advent of Commercial Expert Systems copyright 2013 Rebecca E. Skinner ISBN 978 09894543-4-6 Forward Part I. Introduction Preface Chapter 1. Introduction: The Status Quo of AI in 1961 Part II. Twin Bolts of Lightning Chapter 2. The Integrated Circuit Chapter 3. The Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Foundation of the IPTO Chapter 4. Hardware, Systems and Applications in the 1960s Part II. The Belle Epoque of the 1960s Chapter 5. MIT: Work in AI in the Early and Mid-1960s Chapter 6. CMU: From the General Problem Solver to the Physical Symbol System and Production Systems Chapter 7. Stanford University and SRI Part III. The Challenges of 1970 Chapter 8. The Mansfield Amendment, “The Heilmeier Era”, and the Crisis in Research Funding Chapter 9. The AI Culture Wars: the War Inside AI and Academia Chapter 10. The AI Culture Wars: Popular Culture Part IV. Big Ideas and Hardware Improvements in the 1970s invert these and put the hardware chapter first Chapter 11. AI at MIT in the 1970s: The Semantic Fallout of NLR and Vision Chapter 12. Hardware, Software, and Applications in the 1970s Chapter 13.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Alan Saunders
    SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION LEMELSON CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF INVENTION AND INNOVATION Robert Alan Saunders Transcript of an interview conducted by Christopher Weaver at National Museum of American History Washington, D.C., USA on 29 November 2018 with subsequent additions and corrections For additional information, contact the Archives Center at 202-633-3270 or [email protected] All uses of this manuscript are covered by an agreement between the Smithsonian Institution and Robert Alan Saunders dated November 29, 2018. For additional information about rights and reproductions, please contact: Archives Center National Museum of American History Smithsonian Institution MRC 601 P.O. Box 37012 Washington, D.C. 20013-7012 Phone: 202-633-3270 TDD: 202-357-1729 Email: [email protected] Web: http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/rights-and-reproductions Preferred citation: Robert Alan Saunders, “Interview with Robert Alan Saunders,” conducted by Christopher Weaver, November 29, 2018, Video Game Pioneers Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Acknowledgement: The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Entertainment Software Association and Coastal Bridge Advisors for this oral history project. For additional information, contact the Archives Center at 202-633-3270 or [email protected] Abstract Robert Saunders begins discussing his early family life, education, and early exposure to electrical engineering. He next recounts his time at MIT, recalling members of the Tech Model Railroad Club and his work with the TX-0 and PDP-1 computers. Saunders discusses the contributions of Spacewar! team members to the project and his development of the original PDP-1 game controllers.
    [Show full text]
  • Actor Model of Computation
    Published in ArXiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1459 Actor Model of Computation Carl Hewitt http://carlhewitt.info This paper is dedicated to Alonzo Church and Dana Scott. The Actor model is a mathematical theory that treats “Actors” as the universal primitives of concurrent digital computation. The model has been used both as a framework for a theoretical understanding of concurrency, and as the theoretical basis for several practical implementations of concurrent systems. Unlike previous models of computation, the Actor model was inspired by physical laws. It was also influenced by the programming languages Lisp, Simula 67 and Smalltalk-72, as well as ideas for Petri Nets, capability-based systems and packet switching. The advent of massive concurrency through client- cloud computing and many-core computer architectures has galvanized interest in the Actor model. An Actor is a computational entity that, in response to a message it receives, can concurrently: send a finite number of messages to other Actors; create a finite number of new Actors; designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives. There is no assumed order to the above actions and they could be carried out concurrently. In addition two messages sent concurrently can arrive in either order. Decoupling the sender from communications sent was a fundamental advance of the Actor model enabling asynchronous communication and control structures as patterns of passing messages. November 7, 2010 Page 1 of 25 Contents Introduction ............................................................ 3 Fundamental concepts ............................................ 3 Illustrations ............................................................ 3 Modularity thru Direct communication and asynchrony ............................................................. 3 Indeterminacy and Quasi-commutativity ............... 4 Locality and Security ............................................
    [Show full text]
  • The Real Inventors of Arcade Videogames Copy
    1. The “real” Inventors of Arcade Videogames? As more and more of the early history of videogames comes to light, perceptions of who did what and when keep changing. For example: In a recent paper written by Professor Henry Lowood (Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections; Germanic Collections; Film & Media Collections, Stanford University) entitled “Meditations about Pong from different perspectives”, he reminds us of the story of the summer project of a “recently” (1970) graduated SAIL (Stanford University) student, Bill Pitts, and his friend, Hugh Tuck, as follows: “ The Galaxy Game was a coin-operated computer game for the newly released PDP 11/20, DEC's first 16-bit computer. DEC had fit the PDP 11 into a relatively small box and listed it for a mere $20,000, hoping thereby to open "new markets and new applications." Pitts and Tuck formed a company called Computer Recreations, bought the low-end version of the PDP-11 for only $13,000 and converted the PDP-10 version Spacewar! for this machine, including a Hewlett-Packard vector display, wooden cabinet, and other parts, their expenses came to roughly $20,000. In September 1971, they installed it in Stanford’s student union, where a later version that supported up to four monitors (eight players) could be found until 1979. The Galaxy Game was faithful not only to Spacewar!, but also to the player community (university students and computer engineers) and technical configuration (software code, vector displays, timesharing, etc.) that produced it” Is this not still another story describing the invention of the arcade videogame? So who was really “first”...as if it mattered if they did it independently.
    [Show full text]
  • Jargon File, Version 4.0.0, 24 Jul 1996
    JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996 This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor. This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely used, shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal restraints on what you can do with it, but there are traditions about its proper use to which many hackers are quite strongly attached. Please extend the courtesy of proper citation when you quote the File, ideally with a version number, as it will change and grow over time. (Examples of appropriate citation form: "Jargon File 4.0.0" or "The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996".) The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the years a number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to maintaining the File and been recognized by the net at large as editors of it. Editorial responsibilities include: to collate contributions and suggestions from others; to seek out corroborating information; to cross-reference related entries; to keep the file in a consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated versions periodically. Current volunteer editors include: Eric Raymond [email protected] Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered good form to check with an editor before quoting the File in a published work or commercial product. We may have additional information that would be helpful to you and can assist you in framing your quote to reflect not only the letter of the File but its spirit as well.
    [Show full text]
  • Hackers How-To
    Hacker’s how-to ! “Code Crackers Not Crooks, Professor Says.” The headline perched atop an Associated Press story, and went on to say: “If a professor could have his way, hackers who crack top-secret computer codes would not be regarded as crooks but as eloquent manipulators of their favorite language. For the record, I was the professor, and the sentiments expressed actually were more or less mine. In view of this history, my reading of this self-described “encyclopedic account of the methods by which security is breached and systems penetrated” might be perceived as biased. Readers, beware. It has not been so long since hackers were celebrated. John Badham’s motion picture War Games (1983) opened the gates to many of the now-familiar stereotypes regarding hackers. Youngsters even began aspiring to hacking and phone-phreaking rather than fire-fighting or space exploration. Then followed, unsurprisingly, the demonization of the hacker. Laws were hastily written, and hackers were apprehended and sentenced. Just recently, as I was reading this book unrelated incidents involving students from Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT) brought hacking back into the news. Hacker activity on the fast-expanding Internet, meanwhile, has provoked calls for tighter rules and control of network users. If the subject matter of the book was not sensational enough already, then recent events have only elevated its profile. Youngsters, take note: computer security is a field of fast market growth and technological innovation. The author declares a hacker to be someone "with an intense love of something, be it computers, writing, nature, or sports.
    [Show full text]
  • Five Most Important Modeling and Simulation Projects, Events, And/Or
    Five important modeling and simulation projects, events, and/or technologies starting with the 1960’s to the present. The following are considered modeling and simulation technologies by decades they were developed in. This is by no means a complete list, since modeling and simulation has been practiced throughout known history. However, with the advent of the transistor based computer, modern modeling and simulation really took off. The 1960’s: Real-time Flight Simulation with Digital Computers Since man has dreamed of taking to the skies, there has been modeling and simulation involved. We can only hypothesize how Leonardo Davinci used modeling and simulation to come up with his sketches of flying machines. Since the invention of the airplane, student pilots had to familiarize themselves with the mechanics and feel of flight. In fact, the first truly synthetic flight training device was invented around 1910, where two half-sections of a barrel mounted and moved manually to represent the pitch and roll of an airplane. The prospective pilot sat in the top section of this device and was required to line up a reference bar with the horizon (Moore 2004). This device provided good control input and orientation training but still left much to be desired. In the late 20’s and early 30’s, they began including instrument flight training by linking the instrument gauges to the controls. It was about this time that Ed Link began selling his version of a pilot trainer to the Army Air Corps (Link S&T, 2009) and also the first Celestial Navigation Trainer to the Royal Air Force (RAF).
    [Show full text]
  • Spacewar Olympics” Will Be Held Here, Wednesday 19 October, 2000 Hours
    · ROLLING STONE · 7 DECEMBER 1972 · S P A C E W A R Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums by Stewart Brand Stewart Brand, 33, is a graduate of Stanford (biology). From 1968 to 1971 he edited the Whole Earth Catalog. The first “Intergalactic spacewar olympics” will be held here, Wednesday 19 October, 2000 hours. First prize will be a year’s subscription to “Rolling Stone”. The gala event will be reported by Stone Sports reporter Stewart Brand & photographed by Annie Liebowitz. Free Beer! Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers - Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis- Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines, and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar. Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers’ valuable computer time.
    [Show full text]
  • Digital Equipment Corporation Records
    http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8t72p80 No online items Guide to the Digital Equipment Corporation records Finding aid prepared by Bo Doub, Kim Hayden, and Sara Chabino Lott Processing of this collection was made possible through generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, administered through the Council on Library and Information Resources' Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant. Computer History Museum 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA, 94043 (650) 810-1010 [email protected] April 2017 Guide to the Digital Equipment X2675.2004 1 Corporation records Title: Digital Equipment Corporation records Identifier/Call Number: X2675.2004 Contributing Institution: Computer History Museum Language of Material: English Physical Description: 1,239 Linear feet,611 record cartons, 357 manuscript boxes, 56 newspaper boxes, 169 periodical boxes, and 150 other box types Date (bulk): Bulk, 1957-1998 Date (inclusive): 1947-2002 Abstract: The Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) records comprise DEC’s corporate archives, with material dating from 1947 to 2002. The bulk of the collection was collected and created during the company’s years of operation from 1957 to 1998. DEC, founded by engineers Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, was one of the largest and most successful computer companies in the industry’s history. Widely recognized for its PDP and VAX minicomputer product lines, by 1988 DEC was second only to IBM as the world’s largest computer company. This collection holds the papers of DEC’s executives, engineers, and personnel -- including the personal collections of founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson. Also included are DEC’s administrative records and material relating to product development and engineering, with committee meeting minutes, correspondence, internal newsletters, product proposals, and engineering drawings.
    [Show full text]
  • Nov. 9Th Times to Le Matin in Paris; It up the Displays
    radio across the Atlantic, from Jersey that sold toy trains at the offices of The New York Christmas; Kotok would help set Nov. 9th Times to Le Matin in Paris; it up the displays. took seven minutes. Western Union began First Facsimiles transmitting halftone The Soviets Attack Nov. 9, 1907 photographs in 1921, and the Associated Press began a service Nov. 9, 1979 Édouard Belin used his in 1935. By then the images At 3:00am the North American Bélinographe to transmit a were being referred to as “wire Aerospace Defense Command photograph of a Alsatian chapel photos” or “belinos.” (NORAD [Aug 1]) notified over telegraph lines in a circuit national security adviser spanning 1,717km from Paris to Zbigniew Brzezinski that the Lyon, Bordeaux, and back to Soviet Union had launched 250 Paris, in just 22 minutes. Alan Kotok ballistic missiles at the US. Born: Nov. 9, 1941; President Jimmy Carter only had Philadelphia, Pennsylvania a few minutes to decide how to Died: May 26, 2006 respond. Meanwhile, NORAD Kotok began studying electrical computers helpfully revised engineering at MIT when he was their estimate of the number of only 16. He soon discovered the incoming missiles to 2,200. Tech Model Railroad Club Fortunately, before Carter's (TMRC [Sept 6]), and deadline, satellite and radar programming on the TX-0 [Nov systems revealed that NORAD's 20] and PDP-1 [Nov 00] which report was a false alarm. Jack Dennis had made available It was later determined that the to TMRC members. incident was triggered after a Kotok was the main developer of training scenario had been John McCarthy’s [Sept 4] IBM loaded onto a computer.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Snd Is in My Toolbox
    Why Snd is in My Toolbox Juan Reyes Maginvent.ORG [email protected] December 19, 2011 Abstract This paper presents reasons to see Snd as a good composition tool, with features not often provided in other sound editors and commercial music software. Historical evolution of computer music and research through the years, unfold ideas and elements behind Snd's design and prove its functional goals. A time-line of accomplishments at CCRMA are furthermore plentiful justification as to why Snd's development has been steered the way it has. Here various aspects of Snd's evolution are described, in addition as to why it is a complete music program- ming language, bringing out the most of algorithmic composition and parametric manipulation to computer aided composition. 1 Introduction Choices in digital music processors and software synthesizers abound these days. Having used some of them, including those with sequential interaction (not so real time), and concurrent interaction (real time and instantaneous feedback), from a composer's standpoint, each category serves its own pur- pose. Sequential interaction software synthesis packages are now narrowed to a handful namely Music-N style packages like Csound[21] and CLM-4 [13]. Concurrent interactive systems are more spread nowadays, and include real time packages like Pd[10], and SuperCollider[6]. In addition to the men- tioned categories, studio and performance situations have also a plethora of sound play-lists and waveform editing applications, ranging single file pro- cessing to multitrack packages for overlaying and mixing sound files at once to stereo and multi-phonic mixing. Mixing applications like Ardour [3], also add the benefit of real time digital signal processing by means of plug-ins and extensions to the actual main application.
    [Show full text]