With regard, to Cecil’s report, I know he was mainly addressing the issue of whether CD’s or other storage media deteriorate over time. However, I think it’s far more likely the playback machines will disappear. 8 track players aren’t as common as they were 30 years ago. I know cassette recorders and tapes are still manufactured, but mainly for personal recording. It’s been years since any major label has released an album on tape cassettes. I have several CD players I don’t use. All my CD’s get recorded to my computer and turned into MP3’s and downloaded to a portable player. I don’t have a home stereo, I play all my music through my computer’s speakers. The CD may be abandoned altogether as more people download their albums. The tapes and CD’s themselves may be playable for decades. the technology used to play them back might not still be widely available.
Even the best preserved tapes lose signal. You probably won’t notice it on audio tapes due to the much lower frequencies involved and the much wider track width. But I’ve been digitizing VHS, Beta and 3/4" tapes from the 70s and 80s and all have more noise than they originally had. All are still playable, although I’ve had to do very frequent head cleaning. Luckily I have a stash of proper head cleaner - alcohol just doesn’t do the job that fluorocarbons did.
That’s a lovely song, but it’s an entirely different “By the light of the moon” than the song on 1860 recording - which is probably most familiar to the average person from being one of the “tracks” on the old Fisher Price record player/music box toy.
The only reasonable youtube version of it that I could find is here:
Yes, and Strom Thurmond was about to begin his term as C.S.A. senator.
Nonsense. If I burn a CD but don’t have a means to play it back, it’s still a recording.
It’s the same song. Don’t let the “easy listening” arrangement throw you.
meh, I have an ancient Wang Archive hanging out around here somewhere. Now you want to talk about archaic computer equipment?.. It goes nicely with the old Sperry Univac 1616 ballistic computer.
It is indeed the exact same song as in the 1860 recording.
That would be amazing.
Since this board is devoted to fighting ignorance, is there any evidence to support this rumor that Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (1) came to America, (2) met Abraham Lincoln, (3) recorded his voice?
I’ve seen no evidence to support that rumor.
In Speculative History™, anything that has not been proven to be impossible is assumed to be true.
How fascinating this thread is!
I am awash in nostalgia here. In the early sixties I programmed a Univac Solid State 90, a computer that read 90 column cards. It was enormous and cumbersome and touchy as a colicky baby, but it was a computer, just the same. Debugging or operating it, we stood at a control panel with flickering red lights, just like in a scifi movie, we could run it one instruction at a time, well, we had to, to debug the programs. We programmed in a language known as X-6, but we also learned S-4 (can’t recall why). We were excessively cool. It had a tiny memory - on a magnetic drum. When we got tape, the readers were the size of a semi truck. An engineer spent almost all day behind the tape readers, watching an ocsilliscope (not sure of the spelling). This thing still had some vacuum tubes, transistors were the latest technology. I bet it had about 1/10 the capacity of my computer now. Eventually we got a new computer and then another and when I left it was an IBM 360, I think.
I daresay those cards and tapes are long gone. I suppose it would be easy enough to read the cards if you could find an old tab machine that worked, although almost all punch cards even then were the “standard” 80 column cards, but I wonder about the tapes. Nothing interesting on them anyway, just Compensation statistics, etc.
You’re off by several orders of magnitude. The first IBM 360 had 4,000 bytes of core (RAM); your desktop computer today might have 1,000,000,000 bytes. The IBM 360 had a 7MB disk drive; your home computer might have 700GB. Not to mention the cost, physical size, and access speed differences.
Wowza. I guess the old Univac SS 90 wouldn’t have the memory of my cell phone. Thanks.
Still, it did an awful, awful lot of work. Took bloody forever, but it was a jewel in its day.
Drum programming…you need to read the Tale of Mel: A Real Programmer.
Is it wrong to imagine Casey Kasem doing an intro for this song?
Our next hit of the 1860s comes to you from Paris, France. This was before the days of CDs, cassettes or even vinyl when everyone recorded on pieces of oily paper. From, the Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville Music Factory, here’s “Au Clair De La Lune”.
For some reason, I’m imagining him getting mad like in the infamous “Snuggles” tape. (NSFW®)
“I want a goddamn concerted effort to come out of a record that isn’t a fucking 19th-century French record every time I do a goddamn death dedication!”
**That was wonderful, thank you very, very much. ** I printed it and I’m going to send it to one of the people I worked with long ago. Although, since he stayed in the computer field and I didn’t, he probably already has it. Jeez, he could have written it!
It reminded me of a man named Jack, who was the company rep from Remington-Rand/Univac. He could have been Mel, no kidding. I did some programming in machine language, there were certain tasks you did that way. I never got really good at it. I learned and used Fortran for a time. COBOL was another one, I think. But this was all over 40 years ago!
I still have my notebooks and compiler cards and templates, etc., we all made ours individual, with drum addresses and shortcuts and notes taped or stapled to them. Reading about how Mel used overflow to go from one drum address to the other just brought tears to my eyes. The biggest program I ever wrote, my Masterpiece, was a statistics compilation and I used the overflow to move from one subroutine to the other all through the program, it was brilliant, if I say so myself. Debugging it gave me my first grey hairs, I bet I smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day during that time. You weren’t a programmer if you didn’t have a cigarette hanging in the corner of your mouth all the time, leaving nicotine stains down your chin. No pocket protectors, oh, no, just black lungs.
I’m so glad I was able to share it with you. I first read it as an appendix to the Jargon File, which is available in dead tree form as The New Hacker’s Dictionary.
Hacking on bare metal - there were giants in the earth in those days.
Ponderous man, fucking ponderous.