Expensive Tape Recorder is a
digital audio
Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical samples in a continuous sequence. For example, in CD audio, sa ...
program written by David Gross while a student at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
. Gross developed the idea with
Alan Kotok
Alan Kotok (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital, or DEC) and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book '' Hackers: Heroes of th ...
, a fellow member of the
Tech Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO sc ...
. The recorder and playback system ran in the late 1950s or early 1960s on MIT's
TX-0
The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Constru ...
computer on loan from
Lincoln Laboratory
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and dev ...
.
The name
Gross referred to this project by this name casually
in the context of
Expensive Typewriter
Expensive Typewriter was a pioneering text editor program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer which had been delivered to MIT in the early 1960s.
Description
Since the program could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), i ...
and other programs that took their names in the spirit of "
Colossal Typewriter
Colossal Typewriter by John McCarthy and Roland Silver was one of the earliest computer text editors. The program ran on the PDP-1 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) by December 1960.Eric Fischer (17 May 1999)CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion Li ...
". It is unclear if the typewriters were named for the 3 million USD
development cost of the TX-0. Or they could have been named for the retail price of the
DEC PDP-1
The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusetts ...
, a descendant of the TX-0, installed next door at MIT in 1961. The PDP-1 was one of the least expensive computers money could buy, about 120,000 in 1962 USD.
The program has been referred to as a
hack
Hack may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Games
* ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game
* ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack''
Music
* ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...
, perhaps in the historical sense
or in the
MIT hack sense. Or the term may have been applied to it in the sense of ''
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'',
[:] a book by
Steven Levy
Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book ...
.
The project
Gross recalled and very briefly described the project in a 1984 Computer Museum meeting. A person associated with the Tixo Web site spoke with Gross and Kotok, and posted the only other description known.
Influence
According to Kotok, the project was, "digital recording more than 20 years ahead of its time." In 1984, when
Jack Dennis
Jack Bonnell Dennis (born October 13, 1931) is a computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The work of Dennis in computer systems and computer languages is recognize ...
asked if they could recognize Beethoven, Computer Museum meeting minutes record the authors as saying, "It wasn't bad, considering." Digital audio pioneer
Thomas Stockham
Thomas Greenway Stockham (December 22, 1933 – January 6, 2004) was an American scientist who developed one of the first practical digital audio recording systems, and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing. He also l ...
worked with Dennis and like Kotok helped develop a contemporary debugger. Whether he was first influenced by Expensive Tape Recorder or more by the work of
Kenneth N. Stevens
Kenneth Noble Stevens (March 24, 1924 – August 19, 2013) was the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Ste ...
is unknown.
See also
*
PDP-1
The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusetts ...
*
Digital recording
In digital recording, an audio or video signal is converted into a stream of discrete numbers representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, or chroma and luminance values for video. This number stream is saved to a storage de ...
*
Expensive Typewriter
Expensive Typewriter was a pioneering text editor program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer which had been delivered to MIT in the early 1960s.
Description
Since the program could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), i ...
*
Expensive Desk Calculator
Expensive Desk Calculator by Robert A. Wagner is thought to be computing's first interactive calculation program. Alan Kotok (15 May 2006)The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event Lecture Computer History Museum (Google Video link). Retrieve ...
*
Expensive Planetarium
''Spacewar!'' is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Mass ...
*
Harmony Compiler
Harmony Compiler was written by Peter Samson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The compiler was designed to encode music for the PDP-1 and built on an earlier program Samson wrote for the TX-0 computer.
]
Jack Dennis noticed and ...
Notes
References
*
*{{cite web, title=Tixo.org: Hacks: Expensive Tape Recorder , author=Unknown authors
retrieved24 June 2006, also courtesy Internet Archive , publisher=Tixo.org , date=n.d. , url=http://www.tixo.org/hacks.xhtml , accessdate=2006-12-29 , url-status=dead , archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20050403151221/http://www.tixo.org/hacks.xhtml , archivedate=April 3, 2005
Digital audio
History of software