“Scuse me while I kiss the sky”*…

In 1967, Jimi Hendrix’s manager, Chas Chandler arranged for Jimi to meet Cream…

There was a particular night when Cream allowed Jimi to join them for a jam at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London. Meeting Clapton had been among the enticements Chandler had used to lure Hendrix to Britain: “Hendrix blew into a version of [Howlin’ Wolf’s] ‘Killing Floor’,” recalls [Tony] Garland, “and plays it at breakneck tempo, just like that – it stopped you in your tracks.” [Keith] Altham recalls Chandler going backstage after Clapton left in the middle of the song “which he had yet to master himself”; Clapton was furiously puffing on a cigarette and telling Chas: “You never told me he was that fucking good.” – source

Hendrix’s extraodinary virtuosity has, altogether justly, gotten a great deal of attention; less well noted, his incredible mastery of the technology of music making, recording, and performance. Rohan Puranik explains…

3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. The pedal was a key element of a complex chain of analog elements responsible for the final sound, including the acoustics of the studio room itself. When they sent the tapes for remastering in the United States, the sounds on it were so novel that they included an accompanying note explaining that the distortion at the end was not malfunction but intention. A few months later, Hendrix would deliver his legendary electric guitar performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival.

“Purple Haze” firmly established that an electric guitar can be used not just as a stringed instrument with built-in pickups for convenient sound amplification, but also as a full-blown wave synthesizer whose output can be manipulated at will. Modern guitarists can reproduce Hendrix’s chain using separate plug-ins in digital audio workstation software, but the magic often disappears when everything is buffered and quantized. I wanted to find out if a more systematic approach could do a better job and provide insights into how Hendrix created his groundbreaking sound.

My fascination with Hendrix’s Olympic Studios’ performance arose because there is a “Hendrix was an alien” narrative surrounding his musical innovation—that his music appeared more or less out of nowhere. I wanted to replace that narrative with an engineering-driven account that’s inspectable and reproducible—plots, models, and a signal chain from the guitar through the pedals that you can probe stage by stage…

[And probe it Puranik does– fascinatingly, stage by stage…]

… Hendrix didn’t speak in decibels and ohm values, but he collaborated with engineers who did—Mayer and Kramer—and iterated fast as a systems engineer. Reframing Hendrix as an engineer doesn’t diminish the art. It explains how one person, in under four years as a bandleader, could pull the electric guitar toward its full potential by systematically augmenting the instrument’s shortcomings for maximum expression.

“Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer,” from @spectrum.ieee.org.

See also: “The Technology of Jimi Hendrix.”

* Jimi Hendrix, “Purple Haze”

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As we plug in, we might send well-connected birthday greetings to another wizard with wires, Geoff Tootill; he was born on this date in 1922. An electronic engineer and computer scientist, he worked (with Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn) to design a computer memory. To that end they built the first electronic stored-program computer— the Manchester Baby— at the University of Manchester in 1948.

The Baby was not intended to be a practical computing engine, but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, the first truly random-access memory. Nonethless, Baby worked: Alan Turing moved to Manchester to use it, and the following year, it inspired the Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available electronic general-purpose stored-program digital computer.

source

There are a lot of emulators _of_ the #Sinclair #ZX81, this is one of the very few emulators _for_ the ZX81!

#manchesterbaby #ssem #retrocomputing

So, every week or two I get to play with this… 1024 bits of valve-driven fun!

#RetroComputing #ManchesterBaby #SSEM

An Entire Computer In ICMP Packets

The earliest stored program computer in the modern sense was not one of the names such as ENIAC or Colossus that you might expect, but the Manchester Baby, an experimental prototype computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. Its 550 tubes gave it the multi-rack room-filling size common to 1940s machines, but its architecture makes it a comparatively simple processor by the standards of today. So simple in fact, that [Hrvoje Čavrak] has recreated it using ICMP packets as its storage, and a custom packet filter as its processor emulation. It's a project that's simultaneously both elegant and gloriously pointless, but as he says, " It's still better than doing drugs or JavaScript".

The result simulates the Baby's combined storage and display tube in a dump of the network traffic, and gives an excellent excuse to read up about its operation. The tiny instruction set brings to mind today's RISC architectures, but this is illusory as the designers of 1948 would have had less of an eye towards clock cycles than they would have towards the machine working at all in the first place.

If early computers tickle your fancy it may be worth taking a while to read about the UK's National Museum of Computing, and then about Colossus, the primordial electronic computer.

Header: Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0.

#retrocomputing #icmp #manchesterbaby #tubecomputer