Expensive Tape Recorder is a digital audio program written by David Gross while a student at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

. Gross developed the idea with

Alan Kotok Alan Kotok (November 9, 1941 – May 26, 2006) was an American computer scientist known for his work at Digital Equipment Corporation (Digital, or DEC) and at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Steven Levy, in his book '' Hackers: Heroes of ...

, a fellow member of the

Tech Model Railroad Club The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO sc ...

. The recorder and playback system ran in the late 1950s or early 1960s on MIT's

TX-0 The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Constr ...

computer on loan from

Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and de ...

The name

Gross referred to this project by this name casually in the context of

Expensive Typewriter Expensive Typewriter was a pioneering text editor program that ran on the DEC PDP-1 computer which had been delivered to MIT in the early 1960s. Description Since the program could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter (a letter-quality printer), ...

and other programs that took their names in the spirit of "

Colossal Typewriter Colossal Typewriter by John McCarthy and Roland Silver was one of the earliest computer text editors. The program ran on the PDP-1 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) by December 1960.Eric Fischer (17 May 1999)CYHIST Community Memory: Discussion Li ...

". It is unclear if the typewriters were named for the 3 million USD development cost of the TX-0. Or they could have been named for the retail price of the DEC

PDP-1 The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusett ...

, a descendant of the TX-0, installed next door at MIT in 1961. The PDP-1 was one of the least expensive computers money could buy, about 120,000 in 1962 USD. The program has been referred to as a

hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack'' Music * ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...

, perhaps in the historical sense or in the

MIT hack Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are practical jokes and pranks meant to prominently demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness, or to commemorate popular culture and historical topics. The pranks are anonymously installed a ...

sense. Or the term may have been applied to it in the sense of '' Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'',: a book by

Steven Levy Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for '' Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 boo ...

The project

Gross recalled and very briefly described the project in a 1984 Computer Museum meeting. A person associated with the Tixo Web site spoke with Gross and Kotok, and posted the only other description known.

Influence

According to Kotok, the project was, "digital recording more than 20 years ahead of its time." In 1984, when

Jack Dennis Jack Bonnell Dennis (born October 13, 1931) is a computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The work of Dennis in computer systems and computer languages is recogni ...

asked if they could recognize Beethoven, Computer Museum meeting minutes record the authors as saying, "It wasn't bad, considering." Digital audio pioneer

Thomas Stockham Thomas Greenway Stockham (December 22, 1933 – January 6, 2004) was an American scientist who developed one of the first practical digital audio recording systems, and pioneered techniques for digital audio recording and processing. He also ...

worked with Dennis and like Kotok helped develop a contemporary debugger. Whether he was first influenced by Expensive Tape Recorder or more by the work of

Kenneth N. Stevens Kenneth Noble Stevens (March 24, 1924 – August 19, 2013) was the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. St ...

is unknown.

Notes

References

* *{{cite web, title=Tixo.org: Hacks: Expensive Tape Recorder , author=Unknown authors
retrieved
24 June 2006, also courtesy Internet Archive , publisher=Tixo.org , date=n.d. , url=http://www.tixo.org/hacks.xhtml , accessdate=2006-12-29 , url-status=dead , archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20050403151221/http://www.tixo.org/hacks.xhtml , archivedate=April 3, 2005 Digital audio History of software

The name

The project

Influence

See also

Notes

References