A startling find!

A startling find is a small tropical bird :-). Seriously, though ... I
bought a hand-held cassette tape recorder today, to use to capture sounds
for processing. I was looking around in my office for a spare cassette to
test it with. Well, sitting on a shelf ... right in the open ... was a
cassette labelled "Ed Borasky Computor Music 1978". Now strange thing
number one -- it's not my handwriting on the tape! So of course I played it.
The first section is a three-part harmony of "The Star Spangled Banner". I
don't remember doing this. And the rest of it sounds like some kind of
random loops ... it definitely sounds like something I might have done, but
I can't for the life of me remember how.

Strange thing number 2 ... in 1978 if I had any working computer at all, it
was a KIM-1. For you young sprouts, this thing was a 6502 chip with a hex
keypad, a cassette interface for saving and loading programs and something
like 1K bytes of memory. I had an 8-bit DAC hooked up to it. I didn't get a
real computer (Commodore 64) till 1982 or thereabouts. So I must have
generated this thing on the KIM-1, either using the DAC or tapped into the
cassette recording port. I still have the KIM-1, BTW, and all the manuals,
and I just might be able to find where the code came from. Some of the
sounds are actually quite interesting, and I'm going to scan it into my
computer and put it on my web site. If I can find the code I'll probably
convert the algorithm to Sfront or CSound and post that, too -- it really
generates some interesting sounds, for example, an overtone series.

So ... if anyone out there had a KIM-1 and thinks this sounds familiar,
please let me know ...

(those were the days, eh?)
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, Chief Scientist, Borasky Research
http://www.borasky-research.net http://www.aracnet.com/~znmeb
mailto:znmeb@borasky-research.com mailto:znmeb@aracnet.com

Q: What phrase will you never hear Candice Bergen use?
A: "My daddy didn't raise no dummies".

Ah, that brings back some fond memories. Around 1980, I built a
computer which was a close derivation of the KIM-1, the Junior
computer from Elektuur, a Dutch electronics magazine. It had a
1 MHz clockspeed and 2 Kb of RAM. Then later when the 6581 SID
chip became available, I bought two and soldered them on the
Junior. Also bought a cheap 5 octave keyboard and made some TTL
logic to drive it from the computer's port. So there I had a
6-voice polyphonic organ with programmable sound! The only
drawback was that the software had to be read from a cassette
tape all the time, so usually I left it on. I don't remember
doing any tuning experiments with it, I was more interested in
programming some automatic accompaniment.
Really loved the 6502 instruction set with all its addressing
modes. Later at the university I had to program an 8080, yuck!

>(those were the days, eh?)

Yeah.

Manuel