Normally, I am a deep "lurker" in the MMD scene.  I usually figure
that there are lots of folks out there who know more about most
anything than I.  But this one really brought me out of my chair.

I'm retired from IBM and go so far back into the world of computing
that carbon dating might be more in order than a calendar.

I'm probably the guilty party for those crazy printer music programs.

It started in 1953 with the IBM 701.  Several of us worked the mid-
night shift with little to do and noticed that some of the diagnostic
routines produced a frequency buzz.  Probing around with a small
speaker attached to a o-scope output we discovered that several
instructions could be used to reliably produce, and control to some
extent, a "tone".  (We used the MQ bit in the multiplier instruction).

"Three Blind Mice" was our initial effort.  Within a matter of weeks,
the engineers at the labs had gone bananas and had a whole symphony
of dumb tunes (Christmas carols were big).  In order to hear the music,
it was necessary to connect a small speaker to the appropriate pins
(Inside the mainframe) with alligator clips.

The tomfoolery started again when we announced the IBM 720 printer
in about 1954.  This printer was the first line printer that we had
designed specifically for use on a computer.  It was a wire matrix
printer, driven by a god-awful mechanical mechanism (later changed
to hydraulics), that printed at the blinding speed of 500 lines per
minute.  It sounded like a machine gun.

We quickly noticed that the printer tests -- where we would print
a line of 1's, followed by a line of 2's followed by ... you get
the picture -- produced these "neat" varying sounds for different
characters.  "Three Blind Mice" followed within days.

The chain/train printers came later, with the IBM 1403 in 1958.
By then, everybody in the labs and our customers were playing the
song game, much to the chagrin of management.

This whole thing is closely related to using X's, O's , and other
miscellaneous characters to print large pictures and banners used
in most data processing centers.  Keep in mind that "Graphics",
as we know it today, didn't emerge until the 1960's.

Exactly what all this has to do with mechanical music, I haven't the
foggiest.  With that, I'll retreat back into my hole for another year
or so.

Joe Teagarden