IBM 1401 Mainframe, the Musical
IBM 1401 Mainframe, the Musical: “A touring song-and-dance performance uses musical sounds recorded by Icelandic engineers in the 1960s who worked with the decades-old, room-size computer. Older IBM-heads are loving it.
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When IBM chief maintenance engineer Jóhann Gunnarsson started tinkering with the IBM 1401 Data Processing System, believed to have been the first computer to arrive in his native Iceland in 1964, he noticed an electromagnetic leak from the machine’s memory caused a deep, cellolike hum to come from nearby AM radios.
It was a production defect but, captivated, amateur musician Gunnarson and his colleagues soon learned how to reprogram the room-size business workhorse’s innards to emit melodies that rank amongst the earliest in a long line of Scandinavian digital music.
Fast-forward four decades, and recently discovered tape recordings of Gunnarson’s works form the basis of a touring song-and-dance performance, IBM 1401: A User’s Manual. The show was composed by Gunnarson’s son Jóhann Jóhannsson, with interpretive dance choreographed by Erna Omarsdotti, whose father is another IBM alum.
(Read Original Article - Via Wired News.)
Editor: My first real full time job had a 1401 still in regular use. Luckily I wasn’t responsible for it. We had the same type of musical fun with radios using a Honeywell computer during Junior High.
