The Altair’s First Recital
A Musical Act of Defiance
Lee Felsenstein remembers:
He arrived carrying his Altair and other “stuff’”and crouched to set it up in a corner near the door. He unrolled an extension cord out into the hallway where one of the few live electrical outlets could be found, and then hunched over the Altair to enter [his] program through the front panel switches, deflecting all questions with, “Wait, you’ll see.”
The Homebrewers were interested in the machine but hardly expected it to do much of anything given that it had no display, no keyboard, and only a teaspoonful of memory. But some of them suspected that Dompier would come up with something interesting. He was a likable, down-to-earth fellow around whom the computer universe crackled. Lee Felsenstein was curious to see what Dompier could do with the Altair. If some people are accident-prone, Dompier was serendipity-prone, Felsenstein thought.
He wasn’t accident-immune, apparently. It took several minutes of painstaking switch-flipping for Dompier to enter his program. He knew if he made one mistake, it would all have to be done over. Then, just as he finished, someone tripped over the power cord and erased all his work. He plugged the machine back in and started all over, patiently reentering his program. Finally, he finished it — again.
He straightened up and made a brief announcement to the crowd — little more than an elaboration on “Wait, you’ll see.”
Felsenstein recalls:
There was nothing he could have said to prepare us for what happened. Noise — sound — music began emitting from the speaker of the portable radio he had placed on the Altair’s cover. We immediately recognized the melody of the Beatles’ “The Fool on the Hill.”
Dompier didn’t wait for applause. “Wait, there’s more,” he told the crowd. “It just started doing this itself.”
And then the tones of “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)” came from the speaker.
Felsenstein recalls:
We were thrilled to hear what many of us recognized as the first song ever “sung” by a computer — in 1960, at Bell Labs — coming from this completely amateur setup.
The music stopped and the applause began. The crowd gave Dompier a standing ovation.
Technically, what Dompier had done was just a clever but not entirely unfamiliar trick. He had exploited a characteristic of small computers that would end up annoying the neighbors of their owners for the next five years. The machines emitted radio-frequency interference, the stuff that makes snow in television pictures and static in radio transmissions. When Dompier realized that the Altair made his radio buzz, he decided to play around with the static. He figured out what he had to do with his program to control the frequency and duration of the noise.
Dompier’s little radio interface program, which on paper would have looked nonsensical to any programmer who didn’t know about its accidental side effects, turned the static into recognizable music. Dompier described his accomplishment a year later in an article entitled “Music of a Sort” in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, calling the event “the Altair’s first recital.”
But the Homebrewers understood the revolutionary implications of Dompier’s act. He understood, too, that by claiming this machine for such a trivial, thoroughly unprofessional use, he was planting a flag on newly conquered ground. This thing belongs to us, he was saying. It was this act of rebellion against the spirit of the computer priesthood — more than his technical prowess — that the Homebrewers applauded that night.
This thing belongs to us.
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