[This guest post was written by @satsuma about number 248 on The List. The album was submitted by buffyleigh.]

Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s father worked on the first IBM 1401 mainframe computer in Iceland in 1964. He discovered a way to produce musical tones by running a program that caused the machine to produce stray electro magnetic waves that could be heard on a radio. He recorded this early form of computer music to a reel to reel tape, where it now comes to life as the start of this haunting album.

The album blends a string quartet, electronically treated vocals and a dead pan reading of the user manual for the venerable computer and its associated electro mechanical printing unit, that gives instructions for changing the oil and checking the bearings!

The overall effect is quite moving and evokes memories of a different era of technology, where computers were mysterious machines and running a program was as much an art as a science.

• Bandcamp: Jóhann Jóhannsson – IBM 1401, A User’s Manual
• Discogs: Jóhann Jóhannsson – IBM 1401, A User’s Manual

https://1001otheralbums.com/2024/07/17/johann-johannsson-ibm-1401-a-users-manual-2006-iceland/

#1001OtherAlbums #2000s #ambient #experimental #IBM1401 #Iceland #JóhannJóhannsson #neoclassical

#retrocomputing #ibm1401 #fortran

wow !

https://i.redsnake.io/watch?v=uFQ3sajIdaM

#rolffson's #IBM1401 channel is brilliant. He's built an entire IBM 1401 computer centre in a game engine. Here he explains how he uses #AUTOCODER to solve a puzzle called #BINOXXO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg8ClCfddIg

I was really able to hyper-focus thanks to a track YouTube Music suggested, and of course it's from the album "IBM 1401: A User's Manual." Well played, Jóhann Jóhannsson.

#fridaymusic #youtubemusic #ibm1401 #ambient

-

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Twilight Zone: The Brain Center at Whipple's (1964)

Several Twilight Zone episodes dealt with machines coming to life or taking over or messing things up. In this one the protagonist is a heartless company president who lays off a bunch of workers at his factory and replaces them with computers.

During the late 50s and early 60s there was a Liddite surge in response to computers that had begun to replace mechanical and electromechanical tabulating machines. The old tabulating machines required a lot of manual labor to operate and maintain them. The new computers were replacing a lot of workers, so some people were upset about it. (Of course all those jobs working with the tabulating machines would never have existed if those machines hadn't replaced the human computers and tabulators who did the calculating in the 19th century.)

Computers began to ship in larger quantities in the early 60s because they started to use transistors which reduced the costs significantly compared to the vacuum tube models.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, I highly recommend a revisit of this episode with its timely narrative.

Accessible video description:

A man is watching a film with a company president talking about how a new computer is going to save the company a lot of money, the company president is a bald-headed guy with glasses wearing a suit, he is writing on a chalkboard, the man watching the film is sitting near the projector; then the guy who was in the film is now talking to the man who was viewing the film and asking him for his critique; cut to a guy who picks up a metal bar and starts hitting a computer causing sparks to fly and the bald-headed man grabs a gun and shoots at the guy hitting the computer; then a guy in a lab coat talks to the president about how bad it is now that nobody is working at the company and how empty it is and then the guy in the lab coat walks out; cut to the end title Twilight Zone.

- - -
#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #management #labor #strike #computer #IBM #IBM1401 #severance #RobbyRobot #robot #luddite #neoluddite

(fair use clips from the episode)