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Comment by corysama | Hacker News Reader

Somewhere out there is the story of the guy who brought his Alto computer and electric guitar to the infamous Computer Club. He set the guitar on the computer and the speaker started playing Mary Had A Little Lamb. He had written a program to set and unset registers at specific frequencies.

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According to Steven Levy's 'Hackers'[0] it was Steve Dompier's Altair, it was a radio not a speaker, and the tune was the Beatles' Fool on the Hill.

[0] Which it turns out is online at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/729/pg729.html

Question to Radio Yerevan: "Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?"

Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a bicycle; and fourth he didn't win it, but rather it was stolen from him."

(The canonical version says something like "The information is generally correct, but subject to four adjustments".)

This is how we got sound to play on the TI graphing calculators. It sounded bad and drained the batteries but it was fun. Another fun thing was getting grayscale graphics on those screens. They had only black and white pixels but flipping them on and off at different frequencies made them gray.

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