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Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer
- Joeboy 9y ago> "Congratulations....you've found the secret message syd lives hmmmm. We should get out more." Is what the message reads. Are they referring to the late Pink Floyd guitarist Syd Barret? They're more directly referring to the backmasked message on Pink Floyd's Empty Spaces, which goes: "Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont."
- jxramos 9y agoI remember listening to OK Computer some years ago and I must have been studying or something or other and the track "Fitter Happier" came on. Those familiar know how it goes, the Stephen Hawking voice droning on about all these ideals worth pursuing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimvFbossU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HimvFbossU8). I sat back half listening that evening and this funny response came out in my head, where I responded to the monotone nagging computer's message with "OKaay Computer!". It was interesting because it came out spontaneously in the same sense as "OKaay Mom" in the fashion of perhaps a teenager on some sitcom trying to put an end to his nagging mom's berating him with a bunch of unwelcome or tedious advice. Then I immediately realized the overlap with the album title and thought, "hmmmmmm, is it a commentary on some dystopianish future where the computers nag us humans to get on with some urgent optimum they're trying to press us all into conformity with?"
- surement 9y agoI believe that voice was a built-in Apple text reader.
- pasta 9y agoAs I remember this was done on an Apple computer. In the command line you could do this with they 'say' command. The parameter -v is used for the voice. And I think "Fitter Happier" is 'Fred'. say -v Fred "fitter.happier.more productive" Edit: other sources say it was 'Bruce'. But I don't have an Apple, so I can't check.
- jxramos 9y agothat's cool background. I didn't mean to suggest it was actually the same voice Stephen Hawking utilizes, but just to put forth a popular and familiar sound to imagine with. Though Apple's Fred and Bruce may be the original characters, I'm not sure they'd be as well known as Stephen Hawking but I could be very wrong on that point. I'll try to dig up some Fred and Bruce tracks on YouTube.
- jxramos 9y agoI'm going to lean towards Fred Bruce https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=42 https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=42 Fred https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=49 https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=49
- cyberferret 9y agoMy go to favourite is 'Karen' for the Australian accent. Her voice is far more natural sounding that most of the others I've auditioned, and I use her as the default and pepper all my deployment scripts with 'say' commands now.
- SCdF 9y agoAs a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)
- jxramos 9y agoYou just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.
- kough 9y agoHa, funny you bring up that track – one of my first late nights programming was soundtracked by Fitter, Happier on repeat. I was so in the flow I didn't even realize it was repeating itself. Only when I sat back to take a break did I notice. The weird thing was the immense wave of depression that broke over me when I did.
- jxramos 9y agosounds like it made you "more productive", ha.
- drunkenmonkey 9y agoIt is not a meaningful coincidence.
- ilamont 9y agoRadiohead also released an EP of OK Computer B-sides called "Airbag / How Am I Driving?" It's absolutely brilliant, but relatively unknown. If you haven't heard it seek it out.
- DalekBaldwin 9y agoIt's included in disc 2 of the re-release.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoYes, it's great!
- mattl 9y agoOn the front cover is a phone number, which when called would go to a voicemail.
- usuallymatt 9y agoYeah I love that EP. The new version of OK Computer (aka OKNOTOK) features all the tracks from the EP as well as 3 previously unreleased tracks that they've played live.
- nurblieh 9y agoYes! It includes a great track called "Palo Alto". As someone who lives in the area I've always been curious how it came about, especially circa 1996/97.
- Aqueous 9y agoOddly enough, Thom Yorke insists the album wasn't about the tedium of the modern world, or the perils of advanced technology, but actually how much he hates traveling [1] [1] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/exclusive-thom-yorke-and-radiohead-on-ok-computer-w484570 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/exclusive-thom-yo...
- hellofunk 9y agoBut he also loves to pull the wool over our eyes, he's full of inside jokes that only he understands. Take it all with a grain of salt, he entertains himself as much as the rest of us!
- hkmurakami 9y agoPretty sad they're calling this an "app". If it's dated to 1996, clearly it's a "program"!
- miahi 9y agoEverything is an "app" now. For me it sounds cheaper, somehow trivializing the work of many.
- enraged_camel 9y agoYes, it definitely has a connotation of commoditization.
- nikofeyn 9y agofor many of its uses, it isn't just a connotation. mobiles apps have been commoditized to a point. social apps, messaging apps, cloud storage apps, mobile games, etc. are all basically commodities.
- concede_pluto 9y agoMIME was using "application" in media type names in 1996. I think macOS may have started it because they needed to distinguish them from desk accessories.
- walkingolof 9y agoThat was in a different world, this is the home computer sphere, its a program.
- Symbiote 9y agoRISC OS, the OS from the company that later became ARM, used "application" from at least 1987, and by 1991 that had been abbreviated to "Apps" in some of the UI, although I think we still said "application." These were school or home computers. Picture under RISC OS 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS
- cyberferret 9y agoVery cool - brings back memories of loading programs from a cassette tape on an old TRS-80 back in high school, and watching those "" stars blink in the top corner. I believe the cassette players we used used to also play the signal as audio at the same time it was uploading to the PC. Then, after a few minutes: "Hammurabi, I beg to report..."
- reitanqild 9y agoI remember pirating games using my moms double casette deck in the kitchen. It played the signal as audio while copying.
- Fifer82 9y agoThis never occurred to me until you said it. Did that work??
- jamiethompson 9y agoSometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. It depended on the quality of the cassette deck and also how crappy the tape was you were recording to. Me and my friend often used to try high speed dubbing but that rarely yielded good results.
- Joeboy 9y agoUp to a point. It's an analogue process so each copy degrades the signal. At some point games started having custom file loaders which made them load faster but also served as a kind of copy protection as copies were more likely to fail. Of course it also meant the original was more likely to fail.
- reitanqild 9y agoWe also used something we called turbotape to load our games. We would first load turbotape, forward to where the game was on the tape and then either type <leftarrow>L or SYS<someNumberIcantRemember> to load the game.
- axaxs 9y agoReminds me of the original Quake game on CD, which, if put into a normal CD player, would play through the NiN soundtrack.
- NamTaf 9y agoTotal Annihiliation also did this. It wasn't that uncommon in that era since audio compression was difficult and so a common process was to install off the CD to HDD, run completely off HDD, and then play audio off a series of audio tracks on the CD if it was present in the drive (plus maybe some oldschool DRM by checking for the CD).
- laumars 9y agoThat's not an easter egg. That's just a dual format CD - you can burn them yourself really easily (I used to write these as MP3 CDs so systems that didn't support MP3 could still play a subset of the tracks). It was a really common practice to put in game music as audio tracks on game CDs. Dreamcast GDs also work a similar way where you can play the game audio in a regular CD player despite the data track being formatted differently to the ISO standard.
- dingo_bat 9y agoYup, I was amazed when I put my Moto Racer [0] game CD into my CD player and all the background songs started playing! I was just, in my naiveté, trying to see if the CD player would be able to convert the game binary data into music. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_Racer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_Racer
- digi_owl 9y agoSome audio CDs also came like this. I have at least one that bundled some promo images of the artists. F if i know today why i bought it though...
- dEnigma 9y agoI remember putting the CD for some Windows program into a CD player and being rewarded with horrible screeching sounds. A couple of weeks ago I tried it again, but only got an error message. Seems like "modern" CD players aren't as permissive.
- minademian 9y agogreat concept. i'd say it's more intelligent and meaningful promotion rather than succumbing to hipsterism...
- collyw 9y agoWe didn't have "apps" in the 80's we had "programs".
- bobowzki 9y agoExactly what I wanted to comment.
- Lio 9y ago...and no "coders" neither. We were programmers! But we were 'appy!
- will_pseudonym 9y agoI wonder what synonyms there are for 'computer program.' Does 'application' count? Are there any synonyms for 'pedantry' that you can think of?
- jccc 9y agoThere are vast numbers of programs that run without a UI for people to use. There are also vast numbers of programs designed for action entertainment. Then there are programs like spreadsheets and word processors that are "applications" -- programs with a humane UI, purely for end users, designed mainly to be employed for some other specific productive purpose rather than to be used in themselves. It is true that we now have the more generic "app" thanks to the iPhone,[1] but I think at this point the word is only a little more established in the language than "on fleek." But even when that changes, it won't mean that when grown-ups observe the history and meaning of words as they are actually used they are engaging in "pedantry." [1] (Yes, I know there are examples of prior usage of "app" from long before 2007. I'm talking about widespread, mainstream language, not your technical chats with RMS when you were a comp sci grad student in the 1970s.)
- croon 9y agoThat's cool, I still have my old Spectrum at home, but I would need to find a cassette player for it, but I assume they've started making those again.
- nanis 9y agohttps://www.specnext.com/ https://www.specnext.com/
- croon 9y agoThat's 4 to 8 times too fast! Cool, it seems apparent that nerds that grew up in the 80's have money now, seeing as all these things are coming back.
- linker3000 9y agoWould you be pulling it out of a box at the back of the cupboard after a long period of rest? The Speccy may need some TLC - the electrolytic capacitors are pretty much at EOL and on some of the units I have seen recently, they need replacing. Apart from causing an unstable system, if the caps are well gone, the ripple on the multiple power rails can damage the lower (16K) RAM.
- croon 9y agoIt probably hasn't been powered on for 15 years, so yes. I'll keep that in mind, thanks!
- jerry40 9y agoIt reminded me a strage fate of Syd Barrett...
- Joeboy 9y agoYou see those blocky colours in the youtube video? Those are the Spectrum's "attribute file", a small colour overlay that goes on top of the higher resolution 1-bit monochrome bitmap part of the machine's video ram. Gives you a "hi-res colour computer" while saving a ton of ram, but at the cost of creating horrible artifacts when differently coloured objects get too close together. The same principle is still used in consumer video encoding (and all but the highest-end professional video), where's it's described as eg. 4:2:2 or 4:2:0, the numbers describing how many pixels' worth of chroma (colour) data are provided for each block of luma pixels.
- hashhar 9y agoWhere can I read more about it.
- Joeboy 9y agoFor the modern incarnation, look up "chroma subsampling".
- flohofwoe 9y agoHere's a nice short read with graphics: http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/articles/zx_spectrum_graphics-article_01.html http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/articles/zx_spectrum_graphics-ar... Another spiritual successor to this 'image compression scheme' are compressed texture formats in modern GPUs.
- pvg 9y agoSo there was no separate text mode at all, it seems (which is what I assumed looking at the video). Did it make the text scrolling sluggish?
- abainbridge 9y agoYes, there's only one display mode. But if anything it was better for displaying text than graphics. The rows of pixels were laid out in a wacky fashion to make text rendering fast. The display resolution was 256x192. Being monochrome, the bitmap part of the display therefore used 32 bytes per row of pixels. You might expect that the second row would start at start_of_screen_address + 32. BUT NO! It was at start_of_screen_address + 256 because you can increment an address register by 256 faster than you can increment by 32 (on a Z80). Hahaha. The result was that drawing graphics was a bit fiddly, but drawing 8-pixel wide character glyphs was easy and fast.
- gustavcedersjo 9y agoThe Swedish band Adolphson-Falk included a computer program in the innermost track of its album “Över tid och rum” from 1984.
- Joeboy 9y agoVarious people did, I'm sure somebody must have compiled a list somewhere but I can't immediately find it. Off the top of my head I recall Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Frank Sidebottom including software on their records.
- mattl 9y agoFrank Sidebottom was created as a fake fan of Chris Sievey's band The Freshies. Sievey had previously released a ZX81 program on a B side that played along with the record, showing lyrics, etc. Sidebottom was a character on the accompanying record for the game, called "The Biz" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biz_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biz_(video_game)
- Aaargh20318 9y agoToo bad it's ZX Spectrum only. Would have been cool if it would have been a cross-platform BASICODE program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE).
- tmccrmck 9y agoSpectrum's are legendary in the UK. I'm guessing that's the reason.
- api 9y agoSkinny Puppy had a hidden track like this too. I think it was on Brap but I could be mistaken.
- EvanAnderson 9y agoI am reminded of the last track on Information Society's[1] 1992 album "Peace and Love, Inc.", which was a recording of a 300 baud modem encoding an ASCII text message[2]. Their debut album, "Information Society"[3], used the somewhat obscure "CD+G" format, which included graphics that could be displayed by compatible players. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_(band) [2] http://www.textfiles.com/humor/is_story.txt http://www.textfiles.com/humor/is_story.txt [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmYPQq7JcEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmYPQq7JcEg
- 1001101 9y agoAphex Twin did something similar on "2 Remixes by AFX." [1] There was an SSTV image [2] encoded into one of the tracks. It's basically some calibration header tones followed by FM. For a little while, I didn't know it was data and just thought it was Richard doing his thing :) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvuFdqk8Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvuFdqk8Yg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tjl 9y agoThe box set for David Bowie's Sound + Vision album included a fourth CD that included an extra video track in addition to three regular CD audio tracks.
- divbit 9y agoDoes x86 count as an '80s computer?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bmsleight_ 9y agonever thought I hear the loading sound of a ZX Spectrum again. Love it, Love it.
- zandorg 9y agoDon't forget Pete Shelley's XL1 which ran on a Spectrum from a vinyl record.
- mnem 9y agoGames came on vinyl in the 80s: https://unicornbooty.com/video-games-vinyl/ https://unicornbooty.com/video-games-vinyl/
- bahmboo 9y agoOf course it does.
- mikekij 9y agoMaybe you need an OK computer.
- Xenomorphic 9y agoAfter the introduction, all that hard work is finally rewarded with some scrolling text and a seemingly random arrangement of bloops and bleeps. "Random arrangement of bloops and bleeps?!" Does he not recognize the genius arrangement of Radiohead's newest and most groundbreaking song?! Filthy casual.
- wmichelin 9y agoYou get Radiohead ;) but actually, I hope you can appreciate some of their work.
- EvilDictator 9y agoAll software is know an an "app" now?
- khaki54 9y agoauthor was so proud of coming up with "genre-bending" he had to use it twice
- c3d 9y agoIsn't it depressing that the title says "an 80's computer" because even on HN too few people would know what a ZX Spectrum is? :-)