COMPUTER MEMORIES, Chapter 49

A CAREFULLY CREATED SOUND BECOMES MUSIC
One of the engineers hand-wired a circuit board, added a small speaker, and played music on the RCA 4102 computer. If I remember correctly, the circuit board was hooked to the accumulator (the arithmetic unit), then he created formulas that would cause changes to the binary bits in the accumulator, at a rate equal to the vibrations needed to cause a certain note to be played on the speaker. He created what was called a “subroutine” for each note, then called them into play, as needed. To understand this will take a lot of imagination. This explanation provides very little help, but then you weren’t going to create computer music later today anyway, were you?

This may sound like the engineer was just spending his time playing with expensive equipment, but in reality we were still trying to find out what a computer could do, and so management was happy to have him experiment, by creating music on this computer. I the best I can remember/understood, he was creating music on this computer in a manner different than it had been created on the SWAC and the JOHNNIAC, years earlier.

PROGRAMMED LEARNING
In the late 1950s into the 1960s “Programmed Learning” was all the rage. A book containing “Programmed Learning” problems, questions, and answers, would present a question, and if your answer was right, go to page 37, if it is just a little wrong, go to page 26, and if it is really wrong, go to page 14, and if you don’t seem to understand anything, go back to page 3. For some reason, a lot of big companies spent large sums of money trying to make this kind of teaching work.

My brother, a college professor for 40 years or so, tells that one of his professor friends spent 18 months (being paid by one of the Fortune 500) writing a book for a Programmed Learning Algebra course. When finished, the Algebra program had 30,000 steps. Some programs were tested and revised until any “stupid” person could guess right 98% of the time. The professor’s friends were not impressed.

I remember attending a convention about computer training, in Denver, where one of the more famous consulting companies presented what they said was an outstanding example of how well “Programmed Learning” worked. There were several hundred people in attendance at the meeting, and the speaker told how his company had assigned “Joe” and “Sally” to prepare a Programmed Learning course on how to program a certain computer. The two of them spent a year planning and writing the course, testing with small groups, then printing the books, etc.

Then for a comparison, they assembled two groups of people who were taught to program that computer. One class used Joe and Sally’s Programmed Learning book, and the other was taught by “George.” Sure enough, when the course was complete, the students in Joe and Sally’s class did much better than the ones in the George’s “normal” class.

As soon as the applause died down, since I had a lot of experience in having only a short preparation time, prior to teaching a programming class, in my uneducated ignorance I stood up and asked a question. “If George had been allowed to spent one whole year planning and preparing to teach his class, like Joe and Sally were, how would his students compare to those from the Programmed Learning class?” The meeting broke up almost immediately, and I received about an equal number of “glares” and back slaps.

I’m don’t think my “wise-guy” comment had anything to do with it, but we soon heard no more about Programmed Learning.

I have a copy of a booklet called “Fortran Autotester,” a Program Learning book, written in 1962 by a Ph.D. at Control Data Corp., and published in 1963 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. I haven’t looked at it recently, so don’t really have a comment on what I think of the contents, but I most likely don’t remember enough about the early computer language Fortran (abbreviation for the words “Formula Translator,”) to comment on how useful the book might have been. Fortran was almost the first computer compiler. This is not the time or place to describe what a compiler is or, as mentioned earlier, what an assembler program is, or rather what they were in those days. These days, you most likely would never hear of such a thing as you use your desktop computer, unless you are creating basic software — another term that will not be described.