I enjoyed reading Karl Ellison's story about the IBM line printer
playing music via carefully timed printing of various characters on
a chain printer.  I heard a demo in the mid-1960s that illustrated
this, but even more impressive, to me, was a card reader that played
music as the cards were read in.

A huge stack of punch cards was stacked into the reader.  When the
reader began feeding in the cards, the mechanism that read in the
cards generated tones as the cards as each card was scanned.  The pitch
varied according to the configuration of holes punched on each card.
I assume it had something to do with the flow of air as the cards
entered the read mechanism.  (I think readers of that period used
suction either to acquire the data or else to remove stray punches
from gumming up the works.)

In any case, the performance I heard is right in line with Karl's
suggestion to call this "A Byte Out of Time" as the song played in
this demonstration was Flight of the Bumblebee!

Bob Fitterman
bobf@ilx.com