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Author: applaud on February 22 2007 Viewed 1585 times. 18 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
People who enjoyed reading this: daswesen, lematt, bodo, pierlu001, Otterfan, Tenine, bleen, KidQuaalude, jdg, Roshi, Logo, SenorFrio, PAWEL, deltasleep, AlMagnifico, tonearm, DrexonField, FailedSitcom
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Back in January I went with the kids and my wife to sunny Melbourne for a week's holiday. (Oh all right - sunnyish. The first day we were there it was 39 degrees and humid - that's about 104 in the old money farenheit fans. The other six days it pissed with rain.)
However, weather aside we went to Museum Victoria so we could say that we'd done something educational with the kids and saw Csirac - the only intact first-generation computer surviving anywhere in the world.
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From what I can gather it had about 2k of memory and ran at a blistering 1000Hz and sucked up enough electricity to supply a small town.
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Some pics of the computer that I took:
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It was also, apparently, the first computer to play music in 1950, seven years before . (Colonel Bogey March)
You can get mp3s of the computer music here (they're appalling)
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All of the computer programs were on punched tape and this
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is a photo of the music program written for the computer in 1957. So I'm guessing that that roll of punched tape is the oldest surviving (and probably the first) computer music program anywhere. So it's the grand daddy of your Abletons and your MAX/MSP and your Supercolliders and Fruity loops
So as far as I can see this is the machine that started it all. I was tempted to get down on my knees and make offerings of my first born, but she ran away to see the dinosaurs.
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02/22/07
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applaud
Some stats about this computer
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02/22/07
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Tenine
A good read, thanks for posting 
02/22/07
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mlbot
csirac stats said: "20 32 64 "
woah, now thats my kinda computer! Built like a steakhouse, but she handles like a bistro.
02/22/07
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tantan
oh wow the music is awesome
02/22/07
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Otterfan
02/22/07
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monkvolcano
i think AFX programmed the music examples.
02/22/07
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applaud
I wrote "It was also, apparently, the first computer to play music in 1950, seven years before . (Colonel Bogey March)"
Whichc doesn't mean much.
It should read that
It was also, apparently, the first computer to play music in 1950, seven years before Bell Labs produced computer music. (The tune was Colonel Bogey March)
Much less confusing
02/22/07
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crazyshadow
Well this is great i like history and this is history at is finest
02/24/07
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straight
its still probably more stable than my laptop
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