I was very much into electronic music in my high school years, as I have written about much earlier in this Webjournal. One moment in my electronic years stands out in my memory just as my later visit to Fermilab in 2000 did. I cannot remember just when this was, though some astute readers might be able to help me through the technological details. I have so far failed to find it entered in my written journals of that era. This moment probably took place in 1968 or 1969. It was the day that my father and I went to see the MAC PDP11 computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

My father was, for some years, director of the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University, where I would later go as a student. This entitled him to have access to all sorts of electronic music devices, studios, and concerts. I was constantly using the studio when the Brandeis students weren't there, and my father and I produced hours of taped improvisations, he playing the piano and I playing the Buchla Modular Synthesizer which was the mainstay of our studio. These taped sessions, including pieces of structured music edited from the sessions, still remain only on reel-to-reel tapes and I fervently hope that they have not turned to dust in the long years of storage.

One contact we had was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that is, M.I.T. I believe that our contact was the cyber/physicist Ed Fredkin, who was our neighbor a few houses down. He also introduced us to the famous cyberneticist Marvin Minsky. Through these guys, my father got an invitation to view what was then the hottest computer in the shop, the "MAC PDP 11." Since I was so active in the studio, I got to go along with my father when we visited the computer. We were introduced to the MAC PDP-11 (its "Mac" has, as far as I know, no relation to the Mac of Macintosh computers), and we met Marvin Minsky. Then we got the demonstration.

Not only was this computer able to do simple musical sounds, but it could play chess. Nowadays in the age of "Deep Blue" and other chess-playing computer marvels, not to mention any simple chessplaying program for your personal computer, a chess-playing computer was an exciting novelty.

The computer was set up in its own cramped room, jammed with equipment and specially air-conditioned to keep the electronic heat down. As I remember, it consisted of big, tall openwork boxes with dark-enameled riveted metal facing on them and some flashing lights. These boxes were connected by huge braids of cordage, inches thick, which were taped down to the floor with black electrical tape. We had to be very careful not to trip over them. The communications interface was a little typewriter-like keyboard, and a white-on-black screen no bigger than the 15-inch monitor screen I am currently staring at.

Some electronic music was played, possibly from our Brandeis tapes. Then we were challenged to play chess with the machine. My father was (and probably is still) a fine chess player, and even I could play a little chess back then, so we were confident that we could beat a big clunky machine. But as I remember, the machine played brilliantly in all the games we played. The moves had to be input from the keyboard and appeared as chesspiece symbols on a grid. We thought that a machine could not be "creative" or daring, but in one game, it actually sacrificed its queen for a winning advantage! The machine was amazingly proficient.

I have to add at this point that the room-size computer of the late '60s, attended by a team of experts and costing a fortune to develop and maintain, had less power and computing ability than the Dell desktop at which I am now writing this, as well as my companion Dell laptop. However, the connecting cables are still all over the floor, but behind the desk rather than taped up with electrician's tape.

I was in awe of this great machine, and of its contemporary relative which was at Brandeis. Brandeis had just one computer, and it was also sequestered inside its own special room. This room had a big picture window where spectators could look in on it, as the teams of computer scientists in their white short-sleeved shirts and black pants ministered to it. I never got to enter that room.

In those days I was busy with creative writing, both poetry and fiction, as well as my schoolwork, especially Latin. I was doing plenty of tape music, too, but I was never more than a user of equipment; I was not a builder or a developer or a programmer. It never occurred to me, while in the sanctuary of the MAC PDP-11, to say, "Hey, could I learn to work that thing, too?" And nobody ever asked me whether I might want to, either. I never entered that world. Back as a math-incompetent high school student, I figured that computers were impossible for me, because they involved math. I wonder how things might be different for me had I conceived a desire to work with these awesome computing machines back when I was just a teenager. It is a pointless speculation about non-existence, rather like playing with "alternate histories:" what if the Confederates fought the Communists?

I went back to my life as high school pedant and poet and artist, my mind filled with Vergil and Marvel Comics rather than assembly language. I got C minuses in math and barely passed. More than thirty years later, in a year 2000 I could not imagine back in the late '60s, I stood in the lofty hall of Fermilab, having been introduced to an even more awesome machine, and this time I asked the question and voiced my counter-historical desire. "Could I learn physics? I want more physics!" Now, as 2006 begins, I am still working on the high school physics I never learned back in the days of the PDP-11.

Posted at 4:37 am | link