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Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my roommate was working on a commercial app that was a music composition and sequencing tool. One night I hear

Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my roommate was working on a commercial app that was a music composition and sequencing tool. One night I heard some unusual music coming from his room, and a few moments later he ran out all excited. It turns out that he'd had a bug in his code, and the music we'd been hearing was the program playing itself: interpreting its own code as music data. What was surprising, though, was how coherent it actually sounded as music. There was, for example, a perceptible beat. We always wondered whether this was due to the structure of the executable code, or because of the way the program interpreted its data. Unfortunately he was never able to reproduce the bug in quite the same way. [1] "RealTime" for the Atari ST, see http://tamw.atari-users.net/realtime.htm http://tamw.atari-users.net/realtime.htm

daeken 16y ago
I had a really, really odd experience when I was very young -- probably no older than 6 or so. I was on a 386 running MS DOS 5 and at the time, I was hooked on a game called "Pilgrim's Quest". I was also in the habit of breaking edit.com out on everything I could get my fingers on, and binaries were no exception. I had no idea what I was doing (otherwise I would've been using debug.com), but I would delete things, type random characters, etc. One day, I took edit.com to the binary for Pilgrim's Quest, and proceeded to mess with it, rendering it useless. Except, it wasn't useless. When I ran it, the display was messed up, but pressing keys caused notes to play. To this day, I can't figure out why this would've happened -- I know of no functionality in the game that played single notes (although, to be fair, I don't remember if it played a note and then stopped or continued playing it indefinitely -- this was a long time ago), and I can't see how one could stumble upon that. I really wish I knew what the hell I did, as that was the first time I ever made the computer do something it wasn't intended to do, even if it was not my intention.

daeken 16y ago

I had a really, really odd experience when I was very young -- probably no older than 6 or so. I was on a 386 running MS DOS 5 and at the time, I was hooked on a game called "Pilgrim's Quest". I was also in the habit of breaking edit.com out on everything I could get my fingers on, and binaries were no exception. I had no idea what I was doing (otherwise I would've been using debug.com), but I would delete things, type random characters, etc. One day, I took edit.com to the binary for Pilgrim's Quest, and proceeded to mess with it, rendering it useless. Except, it wasn't useless. When I ran it, the display was messed up, but pressing keys caused notes to play. To this day, I can't figure out why this would've happened -- I know of no functionality in the game that played single notes (although, to be fair, I don't remember if it played a note and then stopped or continued playing it indefinitely -- this was a long time ago), and I can't see how one could stumble upon that. I really wish I knew what the hell I did, as that was the first time I ever made the computer do something it wasn't intended to do, even if it was not my intention.