When I was a young kid, my family had a Commodore 64. It sounds 
approximately something like this:

http://download.orphi.me.uk/Music/Clip1.mp3

(Alternatively, go hit YouTube. You'll find thousands of reconstructed 
C64 recordings, and a few genuine ones.)

And then, one day I came home and found the family gathered around the 
TV. And that's because my dad had just brought home a new kind of 
computer, and it sounded like this:

http://download.orphi.me.uk/Music/Clip2.mp3

My eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. I couldn't believe that we 
actually owned a computer that could sound this amazing. (Trust me, the 
other 3:30 of this track sound equally astonishing.) And there's more:

http://download.orphi.me.uk/Music/Clip3.mp3

(This one also goes on for about 4 minutes, yet fits on a single 
double-density floppy disk. For those of you who aren't that old, today 
we have high-density disks, which reputedly hold 1.44 MB of data. This 
was a double-density disk, the format that came *before* high-density, 
and it holds about 720 KB depending on which way you format it. You 
could still buy single-density disks in shops; those hold about 360 KB.)

Bear in mind, at the time when this happened, you could go into an 
actual music shop and buy actual CDs for actual money containing stuff 
like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qriH-8yeqcE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txQQzZ49zZA

Not so far removed from the clips above, eh? Back then, the idea of 
making cutting-edge music in your bedroom using only a home computer 
didn't seem nearly so far-out.

I doubt anything this astonishing is ever likely to happen again in my 
own lifetime.

(The irony, of course, is that today you can WATCH ACTUAL TV on a cheap 
home computer, render 3D graphics IN REAL TIME, and do countless other 
things that would have seemed laughable back then. And yet, people are 
seldom wowed any more...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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