FerrantiMark1
Latest
After Math: Merry Christmas, you filthy animals
It's been a wondrous week working up to Christmas Eve and not just for the guys with the Tommy Guns. Alamo Drafthouse announced it is starting a rental store and loaning out rare VHS, Protera is going to wake up tomorrow with an order for 25 of its electric buses under the tree, and Google is practically giving away its digital movie rentals. Numbers, because how else will you know how many gold rings you've got coming?
Listen to a 1950s era computer sing 'Jingle Bells'
Here's a new version of Jingle Bells you won't hear played in malls, and it's courtesy of one of the oldest computers in history. Turing archive director Jack Copeland and composer Jason Long have recreated Ferranti Mark 1's Christmas performance for the BBC back in 1951. During that broadcast, the first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer (housed at Alan Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory) performed several melodies created using the sounds it used to emit.
