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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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