{"id":8589,"date":"2025-10-10T02:56:34","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T02:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/someone-programmed-a-65-year-old-computer-to-play-boards-of-canadas-olson\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T02:56:34","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T02:56:34","slug":"someone-programmed-a-65-year-old-computer-to-play-boards-of-canadas-olson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobuzo.com\/en\/someone-programmed-a-65-year-old-computer-to-play-boards-of-canadas-olson\/","title":{"rendered":"Someone programmed a 65-year old computer to play Boards of Canada’s ‘Olson’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Programmed Data Processor-1 (PDP-1) is perhaps most recognizable as the home of Spacewar!, <\/em>one of the world’s first video games, but as the video above proves, it also works as an enormous and very slow iPod, too.<\/p>\n

In the video, Boards of Canada’s “Olson” is playing off of paper tape that’s carefully fed and programmed into the PDP-1 by engineer and Computer History Museum docent Peter Samson. It’s the final product of Joe Lynch’s PDP-1.music project, an attempt to translate the short and atmospheric song into something the PDP-1 can reproduce.<\/p>\n

As Lynch writes on GitHub, the “Harmony Compiler” used to translate “Olson” to paper tape was actually created by Samson to play audio through four of computer’s lightbulbs while he was a student at MIT in the 1960s. He used it to recreate classical music, but it’ll work with ’90s electronic music in a pinch, too.<\/p>\n

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