[sdiy] batch jobs - was: converting white noise to pink noise

[Gene Stopp]

Yup, same age as me...

Used to do our PDP-11 assembler homework on batch cards for the Cyber, had to go find the printout the next day from the bin. Heaven forbid if your rubber band broke and the cards went all over the floor. Then after school if you wanted to go to play Star Trek on a Selectric ("you have 11 Photon Torpedos, what would you like to do?"), you had to go to the window and sign out an ASCII typeball. If you had an APL typeball you were hosed. Valley College had a giant (6 feet by 8 feet?) analog computer in the back room. I asked if I could fire it up, they said "sure, nobody here knows anything about it" so I would make things like spiral patterns on the o-scope with state variable filters. Wonder where that thing ended up.

- Gene


-----Original Message-----
From: synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl
[mailto:synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl]On Behalf Of John Luciani
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 4:16 PM
To: Eric Brombaugh
Cc: SDIY
Subject: Re: [sdiy] converting white noise to pink noise


On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 6:56 PM, Eric Brombaugh <ebrombaugh at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Amos wrote:
>  > On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Aaron Lanterman <lanterma at ece.gatech.edu> wrote:
>  >>  So it's still DSP, even if you're doing it on an abacus. ;)
>  >
>  > meh, I tried it but the latency was terrible...
>
>  Not as unusual as it sounds. Remember that some of the first computer
>  music experiments had to be run as batch jobs (submit deck of cards to
>  operator at window, wait in queue, get tape back tomorrow). Talk about
>  latency - we're so spoiled these days.

You really do go through your code with a fine-tooth comb when there is
a two hour wait to run your program and the window closes in two
hours ;-)

(* jcl *)

P.S. 49 years old and used the CDC card reader in college ;-)

-- 
http://www.luciani.org
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