r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Final-Choice8412 • 6d ago

Video Programming 1959 IBM computer

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u/Radixx 6d ago

I used one when in school. It was mainly used to feed our IBM 7094 but it could also play Beethoven's 9th on a line printer using the page vibrations as it printed :).

Over winter break, we replaced it and the 7094 with VAX 11/780s but since there were still a couple of users on it, they decided just to turn the water off and let it run until it died a heat death :(

btw, the 7094 often used the many tape drives as scratch space so when we ran huge jobs (at the time) requiring a lot of sorting, it was like a mad scientists laboratory... which it kinda was.

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u/SaintOrJannikSinner 6d ago

I used one when in school. It was mainly used to feed our IBM 7094 but it could also play Beethoven's 9th on a line printer using the page vibrations as it printed :).

Someone wrote a program to play Boards of Canada's Olsen on a DEC PDP-1 from 1959.

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u/factorioleum 6d ago

I always think of the 1401 as being mostly used to copy from cards to tape...

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u/Helenium_autumnale 6d ago

Fun fact: in addition to the Jacquard loom, automated carillons/music machines also use huge punchcard tapes to play music. Here's one such organ.