Quotulatiousness

December 28, 2025

“The Singularity is upon us”

Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ESR is clearly not worried about the clankers taking over, at least based on his own experience with coding assistance from AI:

Yes, I’m still 12

I was writing some code the new-school way yesterday, prompting gpt-4.1 through aider, and for whatever reason my mind flashed back 50 years and the utter freaking enormity of it all crashed in on me like a tidal wave.

And now I want to make you feel that, too.

In 1975 I ran programs by feeding punched cards into a programmable calculator. Actual computers were still giant creatures that lived in glass-walled rooms, though there were rumors from afar of a thing called an Altair.

Unix and C had not yet broken containment from Bell Lab; DOS and the first IBM PC were six years away. The aggregated digital computing capacity of the entire planet was roughly equivalent to a single modern smartphone.

We still used Teletypes as production gear because even video character terminals barely existed yet; pixel-addressable color displays on computers were a science-fiction dream.

We didn’t have version control. Public forge sites wouldn’t be a thing for 25 years yet. The number of computer games that existed in the world could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands.

Because of all this, I learned to program over the next ten years with tools so primitive that when I talk about them today it sounds like uphill-both-ways sketch comedy.

You may not even be able to imagine what a slow and laborious process programming was then, and how tiny the volume of code we could produce per month was; I have to work to remember it, myself.

Today I call spirits from the vasty deep, conversing with unhuman intelligences and belting out finished programs I would once have considered prohibitively complex to attempt within a single working day.

Fifty years, many generations of hardware technology, from punched cards to AIs that can pass the Turing test … and I’m still here, still coding, still on top of what a software engineer needs to know to get useful work done in the current day. Gotta admit I feel some pride in that!

This meditation isn’t supposed to be about me, though. It’s about the dizzying, almost unbelievable progress I’ve lived through and been a part of. If you had told me to predict when I would have a device in my pocket that would give me instant real-time access to most of the world’s knowledge, with my own pet homunculi to sift through it for me, I would have been one of the few that wouldn’t have said “never” (because I was already a science-fiction fan), but I wouldn’t have predicted a date fewer than multiple centuries in the future either.

We’ve come a hell of a long way, baby. And the fastest part of the ride is only beginning. The Singularity is upon us. Everything I’ve lived through and learned was just prologue.

August 21, 2025

QotD: Computer models

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Should some sort of post-mortem ever be conducted on the catastrophic failure of all computer models, it will be done with the help of a computer model, that will cost billions in whatever currency to assemble. It will show the need for more computer studies. And therefore, it will be catastrophically wrong.

But note: for 100 dollars or negotiable, I will produce a minority report that will explain everything, infallibly. I will not preview the report in this Idlepost, however, because it might be worth money to me.

Aw, heck. Since I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice, let me just go ahead and blow all the beans. Let me recklessly tell gentle reader why computer models are always mistaken.

It is because their makers decide the result, before they design the model.

This does not mean they are self-interested phanatics, consciously preying on the gullibility of a drooling, ignorant public; although usually it does. For even if, by disposition, they are lofty, objective types, they will need, objectively, a lofty budget to perform a “credible” study. This means they must beg huge sums of money, and this will only be available from a source with an unhealthy interest in the result.

You see, the problem has nothing to do with computers. Even among humans, the phenomenon of “garbage in, garbage out” is well attested. The intention of following the evidence where it leads, is transient. I should think only a saint could sustain it, for longer than he could hold his breath under water.

David Warren, “A note on sternutation”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-19.

July 7, 2025

Why the Cold War Gave Us LEGO, Credit Cards, and Video Games – W2W 35

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 6 Jul 2025

Think the 1950s were all poodle skirts and jukeboxes? Think again! From the first credit cards and modems to LEGO bricks, video games, and even skateboards, discover the surprisingly futuristic side of the Cold War era.

In this episode of War to War by TimeGhost, Sparty dives into the forgotten innovations of the 1950s that still shape our daily lives in 2025.

Topics covered:
• The first commercial credit card (Diners Club)
• The birth of the computer modem
• The first microchip and the rise of computing
• “Tennis for Two” – the 1950s’ video game
• LEGO and the System of Play
• Skateboards before Marty McFly

The 50s were WAY more high-tech than you think!

#1950s #coldwar #inventions #historyyoudidntknow #SkateboardHistory #lego #timeghost #techhistory #Modem #microchips #creditcard #videogames
(more…)

May 14, 2025

QotD: To hell with visual distractions on your desktop GUI

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even that 1990s desktop is too frou-frou for me now, let alone the excessively cute GUIs that replaced it.

My desktop layout doesn’t have a background, or icons, or action buttons, or gradients, or any of that crap. It barely even has color.

I’m not going to name my window manager here, because I don’t want to sound like I’m evangelizing for a particular one. The important part is that it’s all tiled windows all the way down with an absolute minimum of dead space and visual noise.

And I am so much happier than I was with conventional desktop GUIs. I love not having that visual noise constantly pull at my attention.

In hindsight, we spent decades being obsessed with UI details that were just meaningless, distracting fluff. That not only didn’t help us get work done, they were actually a drain on our concentration.

Only part of that can be blamed on pixel-pushing “UX” designers who got erections every time they changed the color or shape of a button. The rest of it’s on us, on people who bought into this glittery fake progress. I used to be guilty of this myself, but I’ve learned better.

Fancy visually-noisy desktop GUIs that suck your attention are the enemy. Fuck all that sideways with a chainsaw. Go simple, go tiled, go minimalist — stop abusing your brain!

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-28.

March 13, 2025

This explains a lot … IRS employees aren’t issued personal computers (in 2025!)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

You sometimes read a small item and the information in it is so unexpected, it’s like being suddenly dumped into icy cold water, like this little item from Reason‘s “Morning Roundup” email:

Everything’s computer! But not at the IRS.

“The upheaval at the IRS is already having real impacts,” reports The Washington Post, referring to plans (already underway) to reduce the workforce by half. “Sources familiar with the agency report that its level of phone service is falling, in part because employees are spending their time waiting to use shared computers to respond to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] requests for weekly emails detailing their work. (Not all IRS employees are issued their own computers.) And they report that taxpayer behavior is already adjusting to the reality of a diminished IRS workforce: IRS receipts — taxes paid already and taxes the agency is scheduled to receive from those who have already filed — are significantly lower than they were at this point last filing season.”

Wait, back up. They don’t have their own computers? And they’re sitting in a queue like schoolchildren in the library, waiting to use a single shared computer to respond to Musk’s five-things-you-did-last-week emails? How long does it take to write those emails? And why don’t they have computers?

Look, I’m worried by the slapdash approach Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken. But the continued federal employee freakout over being asked to justify their jobs by detailing what they’ve done at work makes no sense to me.

I know a girl from college who is a “Work-Life Specialist and Mindfulness Facilitator” at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She leads yoga sessions and “meditation made simple” workshops for federal employees, per her LinkedIn. This is a job I don’t want my taxpayer dollars funding. For Musk to apply scrutiny to this type of thing is a huge win for the American people.

There are lots of legitimate criticisms to make about whether cuts in staffing will actually lead to a better IRS. Taxpayer services will surely suffer if there are fewer people available to answer phone calls and emails; refunds might be delayed, which comes at a real cost to people. Worse tax collection means less revenue for the government, and it’s not like spending is under control — expect the fiscal hole we’re in to get worse if this continues. But “we just can’t figure out how to ration computer use in the year 2025 to craft a bullet-pointed email” is an absurd line that elicits no sympathy, and just leaves me confused about what the hell they’ve been doing all this time. Everything’s not, in fact, computer in the federal government.

January 15, 2025

QotD: Innovations hiding in plain sight

Filed under: Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This sentence, from the Wall Street Journal, strikes me as being profoundly wrong:

    Today, another half-century later, a coast-to-coast flight still takes you as long as it took your father in the 1970s. And with the major exception of computers, nothing in your luggage is likely to be much more useful or valuable than dad’s equivalent.

It may well be the case that aeroplanes fly at the same speeds that they did in the 1970s. I don’t know for sure, but my understanding is that supersonic speeds were banned due to noise factors. No doubt someone in the thread will clear that up. Let’s also concede the point about “major exception of computers” – like wow, let’s ignore the single greatest area of human innovation in the past 20 years.

Okay – the material your luggage is made out of is very strong and very light weight compared to luggage in the 1970s. Your luggage will have wheels on it now. Luggage with wheels would have been a luxury item in the 1970s. The entertainment on the flight will be much better than what it was in the 1970s. Remember the single movie in the cabin? That was a feature of flying until the late 1990s. I reckon the food the would be better too, today. Hard to believe, but yes.

Then what about the computers? Paper tickets? Movies on demand on your own device? Books loaded on your own device?

So while it may be true that the experience of flying is very similar – hurry up and wait, fly through the air, and arrive at a destination faster than all alternatives. But many, many aspects of the experience are very different and much improved. Cheaper too.

When thinking of innovation, it’s not just gadgets and new-fangled things that we should think about – it’s improved business models and improvements in pre-existing gadgets that we should think about too.

Sinclair Davidson, “Has innovation stalled?”, Catallaxy Files, 2019-12-14.

November 21, 2024

1966: Chieftain Tank Simulator | Tomorrow’s World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Archive
Published Jul 15, 2024

“All the tension, the excitement, and indeed the technical demands of driving a modern tank into battle … but, in fact, I haven’t moved a yard.”

Raymond Baxter test drives the British Army’s Chieftain tank simulator, used for training tank drivers. The illusion is created using a large 1:300 scale model of the battlefield, a computer, and a roving mirror connected to a television camera. The battlefield can be altered simply by swapping out the model trees and buildings.

Mr Baxter can attest to how realistic the experience is, and it costs just one tenth of the price of training in a real Chieftain tank.

Clip taken from Tomorrow’s World, originally broadcast on BBC One, 28 September, 1966.

November 16, 2024

The 1980 Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament

Filed under: Gaming, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander starts a post titled “The Early Christian Strategy” with some relevant back-story (fore-story?) involving game theory and the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma:

An example prisoner’s dilemma payoff matrix drawn by CMG Lee using emojis from Wikimedia Commons.

In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament.

He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE.

In the “tournament”, each bot “encountered” other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners’ Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won.

To everyone’s surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT:

  1. Always COOPERATE on the first move.
  2. Then do whatever your opponent did last round.

This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won — although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top.

In certain situations, this strategy is dominated by a slight variant, TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS. That is, in situations where a bot can “make mistakes” (eg “my finger slipped”), two copies of TIT-FOR-TAT can get stuck in an eternal DEFECT-DEFECT equilibrium against each other; the forgiveness-enabled version will try cooperating again after a while to see if its opponent follows. Otherwise, it’s still state-of-the-art.

The tournament became famous because – well, you can see how you can sort of round it off to morality. In a wide world of people trying every sort of con, the winning strategy is to be nice to people who help you out and punish people who hurt you. But in some situations, it’s also worth forgiving someone who harmed you once to see if they’ve become a better person. I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here. And pragmatically, this is good, common-sense advice.

For example, compare it to one of the losers in Axelrod’s tournament. COOPERATE-BOT always cooperates. A world full of COOPERATE-BOTS would be near-utopian. But add a single instance of its evil twin, DEFECT-BOT, and it folds immediately. A smart human player, too, will easily defeat COOPERATE-BOT: the human will start by testing its boundaries, find that it has none, and play DEFECT thereafter (whereas a human playing against TIT-FOR-TAT would soon learn not to mess with it). Again, all of this seems natural and common-sensical. Infinitely-trusting people, who will always be nice to everyone no matter what, are easily exploited by the first sociopath to come around. You don’t want to be a sociopath yourself, but prudence dictates being less-than-infinitely nice, and reserving your good nature for people who deserve it.

Reality is more complicated than a game theory tournament. In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount. In the real world, we have edge cases like poor people, who haven’t done anything evil but may not be able to reciprocate your generosity. Does TIT-FOR-TAT help the poor? Stand up for the downtrodden? Care for the sick? Domain error; the question never comes up.

Still, even if you can’t solve every moral problem, it’s at least suggestive that, in those domains where the question comes up, you should be TIT-FOR-TAT and not COOPERATE-BOT.

This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world.

August 5, 2024

Short-term technological forecast – “If I were a commercial pilot, I’d tell you to return to your seats and buckle up”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Most of this Ted Gioia post is behind the paywall (and if you can afford it, I’m sure you’d get your money’s worth for a subscription):

I anticipate extreme turbulence on every front for the remaining five months in 2024. You will see it in politics, business, economics, culture, world affairs, the stock market, and maybe even your own neighborhood.

That’s one of the themes of my latest arts and culture update below.

What happened to the AI business model last week?

After almost two years of hype, the media changed its opinion on AI last week.

The hype disappeared almost overnight

All of a sudden, news articles about AI went sour like reheated 7-Eleven coffee. The next generation AI chips are delayed, and 70% of companies are behind in their AI plans. There are good reasons for this — most workers now say AI makes them less productive.

People are also noticing that AI businesses want to use the entire electricity grid to run their money-losing bots. Meanwhile AI companies are burning through cash at historic levels. Even under the best case scenario, this all feels unsustainable.

But the worst disclosure, in my opinion, came on July 24 — just eleven days ago.

A study published in Nature showed that when AI inputs are used to train AI, the results collapse into gibberish.

This is a huge issue. AI garbage is now everywhere in the culture, and most of it undisclosed. So there’s no way that AI companies can remove it from future training inputs.

They are caught in the doom loop I described last week.

That same day, the Chief Investment Officer at Morgan Stanley warned investors that AI “hasn’t really driven revenues and earnings anywhere”. One day later, Goldman Sachs quietly released a report admitting that the AI business model was in serious trouble.

Even consulting firms, who make a bundle hyping this tech, are backtracking. Bain recently shared the following chart (hidden away at the end of a report) which explains why AI projects have failed.

These findings are revealing. They show that management is absolutely committed to AI, but the tools just don’t deliver.

And, finally, last week the media noticed all this.

They published dozens of panic-stricken articles. Investors got spooked too — shifting from greed to fear in a New York minute. Over the course of just two days, Nvidia’s stock lost around $400 billion in market capitalization.

In this environment, true believers quickly turn into skeptics. The whole AI business model gets scrutinized — and if it doesn’t hold up, investment cash flow dries up very quickly.

This is exactly what I predicted 6 months ago. Or even a year ago.

I expect that the next few weeks — or maybe even the next few days — will be extremely turbulent in the AI world.

Buckle up!

The dominant AI music company just admitted that it trained its bot on “essentially all music files on the Internet”.

Suno is a huge player in AI music — it tells investors it will generate $120 billion per year. Microsoft is already using its technology.

But there’s a tiny catch.

The company now admits in a court filing:

    Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions

Hey, this is totally illegal — it’s like Napster all over again.

Suno will need to prove that all these copyrighted songs are “fair use” in AI training. I doubt that any court will take that claim seriously.

If the music industry is smart, they will use this violation to shut down AI regurgitation of copyrighted songs.

If the music industry is stupid — run according to my “idiot nephew theory” — they will drop charges in exchange for some quick cash.

May 11, 2024

Apple crushes it

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You might not believe me, but I haven’t seen the Apple ad that everyone is hating on. I actively avoid ads of all kinds and refuse to open websites that are little more than shills for whoever is paying for the advertising. That aside, the description of the current ad — that Apple has already apologized for, I’m told — would certainly make me less likely to deal with the company that produced it:

Not since Kendall Jenner slipped away from a modeling shoot to defuse the tensions around a Black Lives Matter protest by handing a can of Pepsi to a riot cop has a mainstream ad campaign generated as much hostility as the just-released spot from Apple pitching the arrival of the thinnest iPad ever.

The ad was shared on Twitter by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who implored potential customers to “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.” The clip shows a huge hydraulic press slowly crushing a bunch of old analog-era creative tools and treats, including a trumpet, an acoustic guitar and a piano, a record player, a camera, an old stand up arcade game, some rubber squeeze toys, and a bunch of paint cans. Then it pulls up to reveal the new, ultra thin iPad Pro, which has assimilated all of these things like some flatland Borg.

You can see what Apple was going for here – all these old, bulky, single purpose tools and playthings are now available at your fingertips, in a package no bigger than a magazine. It’s an upgraded version of that old meme that used to go around about everything that used to be literally on your desktop – phone, typewriter, file folders, fax machine, and so on – is now digitally sitting there on your computer desktop.

People got it all right. The response to the spot was immediate, visceral, and vicious. They hate it.

How did Apple go so wrong?

The most salient feature of the western mind’s relationship with technology is the ambivalence we have felt ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods. On the one hand, we can now cook our food and keep ourselves warm. On the other hand, who knows where this will lead? Have we unleashed forces that will lead us to our destruction, or at least, lead us away from our true, authentic, selves? We love technology but we fear it, and the pendulum tends to swing from one extreme to the other depending on a host of factors, the most important of which is probably the rate of change and innovation. The faster things move, the less time we have to adapt, and we fear what is being lost more than we appreciate what is being gained.

We are living through a period of what is for most of us unprecedented technological change, where the threats – to both humanity, and to our humanity – seem more urgent than they have in decades, certainly since the advent of the nuclear bomb. Whether it is the sudden fears over AI or the rising moral panic over smartphones or the leery way we look at self-driving cars, there is a firm sense that things are just happening too fast, that the old is being replaced by the new in ways we are barely able to process, let alone control.

Update, 17 May: Samsung picks up something from the wreckage:

The publicity error was compounded by a frenzy of critical mainstream media coverage accompanied by celebrities expressing their outrage at the ad. But Samsung was not ready to let it lie.

The South Korean consumer technology mega-corp posted a short video on Twitter — which now calls itself X — accompanied by the hashtag “UnCrush”.

It shows a young woman walking into what appears to be the wreckage left behind by the Apple ad. Picking up a badly damaged guitar, with strings missing and holes in the body’s soundboard, she nonetheless sits down to play, reading music from a Samsung tablet.

“We would never crush creativity,” Samsung says in the social media post.

It might be a cheap shot, but it is one that is bound to sting for Apple.

April 20, 2024

QotD: Cyber-addiction

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Researchers at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry say the distractions of email and such extract a toll on intellectual performance as similar to that of marijuana. The study of 1,100 volunteers found that attention and concentration could be so frazzled by answering and managing calls and messages that IQ temporarily dropped by 10 points. The resulting loss of focus due to “Crackberry”, in fact, was judged to worse than that experienced by pot smokers.

This, of course, cannot really be a surprise. It is a great hallmark of modern life that over-indulgence in practically anything can be turned into pathology given enough time and clinical studies.

Jeff A. Taylor, Reason Express, 2005-04-26.

February 2, 2024

QotD: Financial bubbles

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That financial markets sometimes go off on one has been noted for centuries now. Dutch Tulips, the South Sea Bubble, Dotcom and more recently Bitcoin have all shown that the lust for easy speculation profits can lead to, well, to financial excess at minimum. Those with an orderly cast of mind like to point out that all of this is waste. If instead the truly wise and clever people – after we’ve installed them in government or at least the bureaucracy – could apportion society’s assets very much better. You know, truly invest in the diversity advisers civilisation so badly needs.

The thing is, economists often disagree at this point. Sure, financial bubbles, they occur. Sure, there’s waste in them. But perhaps the very bubble itself is an either useful or necessary part of the process.

Necessary in that perhaps it needs a mania to get some new technology over the finish line. I tend to think it’s not going to happen with Tesla but it did with Railway Mania. Without speculators searching for easy money the network never would have been built out. Without Dotcom Amazon probably wouldn’t have got funded through the decade it was scratching a living.

It’s also possible that it’s just useful. For the overbuilding in the mania might then leave assets that are repurposed to get other technologies over that finish line into general use. Global Crossing lost a fortune – no, really billions – on building out fibre optic cabling to girdle the world. Which was, after the bankruptcy, bought up by the Googles and the like to carry all this web and video stuff. It’s arguably true that without the previous overinvestment we’d simply never have developed – or perhaps not for decades – such resource and bandwidth-hungry hogs.

Tim Worstall, “Cloud Rendering – The Latest Proof That Investment Bubbles Actually Work”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-17.

January 6, 2024

QotD: “Computer people are just people”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Not being a computer person myself, I keep forgetting that computer people are just people, meaning they’re no less silly, cliquish, and fad-chasing than the rest of us. Meyers-Briggs seems like a very short step above astrology to me — do I really need a long questionnaire to tell me I’m an extrovert? — but I shouldn’t be surprised that computer people like it. In my experience, “psychology” is to computer people what “computers” are to psych majors — randomly blinking ooga booga boxes that do some cool things, but are mostly a terrifying mystery. Liberal Arts people (of which Psych Majors are the most liberal) love Apple products not least because they promise to bury all that blinky ooga-booga stuff under “the user experience”; thus it shouldn’t surprise me that a quick-and-easy “test” that promises to unlock the secrets of the psyche appeals to the other sort.

Severian, “For Future Historians’ Benefit…”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-21.

October 2, 2023

Why Web Filters Don’t Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem

Filed under: Britain, China, Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 6 Jun 2016

In a small town with an unfortunate name, let’s talk about filtering and innuendo. And use it as an excuse for as many visual jokes as possible.
(more…)

March 28, 2023

Computers and music, from 1961 to 2001

Filed under: History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia explains the deep history behind the scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where H.A.L. sings a song:

Not many people could afford an IBM 7094 computer back in the early 1960s — a typical installation cost $3 million. That’s the equivalent of around $20 million in purchasing power today. Over the course of the decade, fewer than 300 were built.

You didn’t get much computing power for that hefty price tag, at least by current-day standards. But if you wanted a machine that did complex or rapid math, you had few other options. The 7094 could handle 250,000 additions or subtractions in just one second. A whole room of accountants couldn’t keep up with it.

But addition and subtraction aren’t very sexy. So someone got the bright idea of teaching the IBM 7094 to sing. That’s why John L. Kelly Jr., Carol Lockbaum, and Lou Gerstman of Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, began working in 1961 on this pioneering computer music project.

Digital music wasn’t an entirely new development, even in those distant days, but singing presented completely different challenges, requiring breakthroughs in speech synthesis. But Bell Labs — then the in-house research arm of AT&T (it’s now part of Nokia) — had more expertise in that area than any other organization in the world.

The Bell Labs team needed a song for their experiment. They decided on “Daisy Bell” — also known as “Bicycle Built for Two” — composed by British tunesmith Harry Dacre in 1892.

The idea for the song came to Dacre when he visited the US and found, to his surprise, that the customs officials had imposed a tariff on his bicycle. A friend quipped that he was lucky it wasn’t a bicycle with two seats, or the duty might have been double. The end result was Dacre’s most successful song ever.

[…]

Even back in the early 1960s, this tune didn’t have much hipness potential. But at least the melody was simple, well-known, and no longer protected by copyright. (That said, I would love to watch a jury in 1961 debate computer music rights.)

For the instrumental parts of the song, the Bell Labs team relied on contributions from Max Matthews, who had created a breakthrough sound-generating program called MUSIC back in 1957. In those ancient analog days, he had hooked up his violin to an IBM 704, and was thus the first performer in history to transfer live music to a computer for synthesis and playback.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress