Sounds of the 60s: the IBM 1401 (punchcard collation, reel-to-reel recorder, etc). These aren’t the sounds of my computing childhood but I imagine they’re nostalgic for some of you.
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I was a first year computer science student at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) in 1965. Our first lessons weren’t even on a computer; rather, we got to play with electronic adding machines where we learned that if you tried to divide by zero, it would set the machines into an infinite loop which could only be terminated by unplugging it. Remarkably, the language we learned to program with - COBOL - is still around.
See also Jóhann Jóhannsson's fine album "IBM 1401, A User’s Manual," which seems like something I might have found out about on this very blog, but maybe not?
I'm not sure I've ever posted about it, but it is in my music library. 👍
While I took one of the very last of Miami(O)'s Fortran classes on punch cards, in the early 80's no less ... all of those sounds happened on the other side of a wall. We just made the cards on a card punching terminal and handed the decks over, getting the deck back with a printout.
If you search on IBM 1401 music you will see quite a bit on YouTube. I wrote about it here, including a very Enoesque video that’s hard to find https://smartpeopleiknow.com/2007/11/29/i-hear-the-mermaids-ibm-1401-singing/
That printer is quieter than the one I remember. I started in the System 360 / 370 days in 1974, but the printer was 1403 so related to those. It had a noise-dampening cover but when it ran out of paper it would automatically raise that cover and it would be very _loud_. Many people who worked inside a mainframe datacenter from the 1970s developed the habit of speaking loudly due to all of the noises in there.
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