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Rock me Amadialus
More of you write with exciting tales of computers that used a telephone rotary dial as an input device.
‘In the early 1960s my uncle Tom O’Beirne – chief mathematician at Barr and Stroud – built a computer called Solidac with his friends at the University of Glasgow,’ recalls David Rodrick, at the NHS Information Authority.
‘This also had a telephone dial as
an input device. As far as I can recall, Solidac’s main claim to fame was that it made an LP (predecessor of the CD for those too young to remember). It used a random number generator to order the bars of music Mozart wrote – with the original idea of using dice to produce a sequence of bars – and then played them. The result was intellectually interesting, though sonically somewhat pathetic.’
A computer to randomise Mozart! Almost as useful as a telephone dial as an input device. We suppose no one told them that the notes were written in a specific order for a reason.
Re: SOLIDAC and T.H. O'Beirne
SOLIDAC was originally constructed to demonstrate Barr & Stroud capabilities with discrete logic components in the mid-to-late 1950s and was a one-of-a-kind machine. It had 1K of 20 bit core memory with a built-in hard-wired loader (teflon cores). It did indeed have a telephone dialer as an auxiliary input device and used 5-hole tape in and out in addition to the console lights. SOLIDAC was a serial machine and the "music" was generated by creating sequences of pulses on the main data highway (bus). Clock speed was 30 KHZ. The speaker was tapped into the highway and the sound heard was the data passing by (a similar approach was also used on KDF-9 to monitor tape activity).
Tom O'Beirne was a brilliant mathematician and wonderful individual of whom I have many fond memories.
Dice music was a popular 17th/18th century parlour game in which compositions were created by combining individual bars in random order (based on a throw of the dice). A number of composers created scores specifically for this purpose - not only Mozart.
SOLIDAC's identified claim to fame - the LP, of which I have a copy - is surely surpassed by its starring role in a TV program dedicated to the man, machine and their music.
The true significance however, lies not in the fact that SOLIDAC could play music but that yet another a brilliant Scottish scientist could make technology sing!
Posted by :John Davis | September 15, 2004 10:19 PM
As an employee in Barr and Strouds London Office I remember attending a demonstration of the computer, presumably SOLIDAC. As I recall it only played it's own compositions in the style of Mozart.
Posted by :Jim Jerwood | December 1, 2004 4:32 PM
Re: SOLIDAC and T.H. O'Beirne
I have just found this web site and was interested in the Comment by John Davis. I thought your readers mignt be interested in the following comment:
I agree fully with his comments about Tom O'Beirne who I knew well after meeting him in 1959. In fact I was the original designer of SOLIDAC which was conceptually started in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Glasgow where I was teaching in 1956; this project was delayed for about 2 years and finalised in the early '60s. It was then in 1959 that I was approached by O'Beirne, through the Computer Science Department, to know if Barr and Stroud could help in the development of the computer. This worked out well as an admirable solution to getting the computer constructed. To cut a long story short - the point I wished to make was that the original dsign was mine and led to my Ph.D. and O'Beirne, and others, made helpful suggestions and he was highly involved in the construction. I left the University for Canada in 1962, the computer being completed in 1963. O'Beirne then used it to produce a number of musical items, including some bagpipe music (for which I have an audio tape) before it was handed over to the University where it was used for some programming teaching until the 1980s when it was put into storage. I heard later that it had been transferred to a museum in Edinburgh - though I cannot vouch for this. I was not aware of it being shown in a TV show - when and where was this, do you know?
If you are interested there is a full paper, including a few photographs, that I wrote about SOLIDAC in 1993. Reference:
Solidac: An Early Minicomputer for Teaching Purposes by Paul A. V. Thomas in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol.15,No. 4, 1993; pps 79-83.
Posted by :Paul A. V. Thomas | May 9, 2005 8:50 PM
Tom O'Beirne, how wonderful! In the 1970s I worked with Tom as Electronics Technician in the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University. One thing we did was to bring old Solidac back with its big front-panel clock and filament bulbs and put it in the basement. I put an amplifier and speaker on the early microsystem I built so Tom could make music on that too. This great man taught me key insights that I still use today (I am quite well-published in EDA). Tom also taught me my limits - he could lose me in one of his lectures on packing puzzles despite my best efforts to comprehend. Tom was a true Renaissance Engineer.
Posted by :John Berrie | March 13, 2007 3:47 PM
I worked with the wonderful Tom O'Beirne in the 1970s at Glasgow University when I was a young man. I remember well that to the consternation of some colleagues he arranged for old Solidac to be hauled into the basement at our Lilybank Gardens buildings and even got it running. I put an amplifier on the first microsystem I put together and he played tunes on that, too. I regard Tom as one of the principal mentors of my life - to this day I apply the bits of his talent that rubbed off on me.
Posted by :John Berrie | March 14, 2007 4:41 PM
How very interesting to follow this thread, which I only came upon today. I worked on SOLIDAC from the beginning, under the leadership of Alan McKillop (representing the Engineering input) and ThOB (as we knew him) at Messrs Barr & Stroud Ltd, in Anniesland, Glasgow. These were two truly gifted professionals with whom I had the privalege to work, and who made a lasting impression throughout my own professional career.
From initial drawings to commissioning, and through two subsequent recommissioning projects in Lilybank Gardens I worked closely with ThOB during these four years, and beyond. His passing marked the end of an era.
In house, we knew SOLIDAC as the Barr And Stroud Transistorised Automatic Reckoning Device, and were fully aware of its ground breaking memory and switching circuitry (ferrite core RAM and germanium pnp transistors)! The loader (or boot strap) was a ROM which consisted of 96 rows of 20 tiny torroids, some of which were tufnol, while others were of ferrite. In this way, 96 x 20 bit data words were available at power-up, if a current surge was first passed through each address in turn, and then the contents read. Being non magnetic, the tufnol torroids yielded a binary 0, and the magnetic ferrite cores yielded a binary 1.
In the later stages of the project, it was most amusing to hear other engineers in the lab whistling some of the more catchy Dice Music tunes generated by Solidac, while getting on with their own work, and after leaving Barr and Strouds in 1963, I was very grateful to ThOB when he sent me a complementary copy of his Dice Music LP.
Posted by :Ronald Fairley | September 24, 2008 12:43 PM