Wow, and when I thought midi music was annoying and crappy. Still interesting though. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7458479.stm

Link has both video and audio of the 'recording.'

Considering you had to program it with switches and dials and it was powered by 1500 valves (tubes) with no storage, that was pretty interesting. Definitely one of those things to do 'because we could'.

I find the digitized wax cylinders on archive.org interesting, though.

Sounds good. Reminds me of the Chemical Brothers...

My first experience with computer music was in the mid 60's on an IBM 1401. I know that's not near as far back as the star of this thread, but it goes back about as far as my awareness of computers.

The IBM 1401 radiated rf energy like nobody's business. If you put a transistor radio on top of the cpu you could hear the program run. Somebody wrote a program with timed loops for different pitches and got it to play "Anchors Aweigh".

The connected line printer used a font chain that moved sideways across the paper so that printing a whole row of the same letter made a zinging sound. Somebody figured out how to time that for different pitches and got a printer that played music. Playing a song once used up several pages of paper with gibberish printed all over them.