This is all sorts of wonderful. Twelve Sinclair ZX Spectrum vintage home computers, networked together to play the first bit of Mahler's First Symphony. Why? Because of a throw-away line in the original Spectrum's manual from 1982.
But I am troubled.
I taught myself programming on a ZX81, then a ZX Spectrum, and through a series of unlikely events ended up at Sinclair Research in the mid-80s. My first real job there was taking the original source code for the ZX Spectrum, which lived in a handful of largely undocumented slabs of raw Z80 mnemonics, and rebuilding it into an editable form for the ZX Spectrum 128 project. I had to rely on Ian Logan and Frank O'Hara's Complete Spectrum Rom Disassembly book, as the Sinclair documentation was about three comments and a semi-descriptive filename.
(Later, I worked for Amstrad on the Spectrums +2 and +3. I also wrote advertising copy for them. As the +3 had MIDI, I wrote that it "could play a symphony" - the boss made me take that out, over my objections, as he wasn't sure it was technically true. Thirty years on, I have been proved right. Oh yes.)
As it was for uncounted thousands of others, the Spectrum was a life-shaping slab of warm black plastic.
I am unstinting in my love.
I am also a terrible snob. While I am delighted by the Mahler project, I must question some of the decisions.
The first is the use of a Raspberry Pi as the central synchronising conductor. Some may say that the Pi is the spiritual successor to those revolutionary days of home computing, and I would not demur. Some may say that it is not only valid but essential to allow the performance and interpretation of all great works of music to adapt to their times, bridging the sensibilities of the present with the eternal genius of the creator. Of course, of course.
But what we have here is the equivalent of original instruments playing music in the original style. The Pi is hugely connected - one would say tainted - with Sinclair's great rival, Acorn Computers and its BBC Micro. Think Herbert von Karajan vs. Wilhelm Furtwängler, or Oasis vs. Blur. Having a Pi at the centre of things is like Blur reforming (oh, they have) and touring with Noel Gallagher as musical director (oh, he isn't). The Pi is a placeholder in the eternal war of Z80 vs 6502, and that must never, ever, be forgotten, let alone capitulated.
Why was the Pi even necessary? That a central synchroniser was needed - sure. Different Spectrums can run at subtly different speeds - the later models especially - and they can't keep time so well. But surely another Spectrum could waggle the virtual baton? Conductors do not keep strict tempo - a job for metronomes - and that is fine, as long as the orchestra follows.
The other is the use of modern Soectranet Ethernet adaptors. Now, these are wonderful in their own right; I saw the prototype running a Twitter client on a ZX Spectrum at the Bletchley Park Vintage Computing Fair a while ago, and rejoiced at the absurd pleasure it gave. But the Ethernet standard, 802.3, was introduced in 1983, the year after the Spectrum. Not quite anachronistic, certainly inappropriate. Why not use ZX Net, the network built into the Spectrum's own Interface 1? That would also provide the famous Sinclair-designed mass storage 'solution', the Microdrive, which nicely sidesteps the rather dull business of loading tape software into the twelve computers of the symphony.
I freely admit that these complaints are niggardly, mean and pointless. It would have meant a lot more work for the volunteers behind the project, and not one in a thousand of those attending would have cared. As it is, the project succeeded admirably in celebrating the hacker ethos, keeping history alive, and promoting the human nature of technology in an age where it can seem remote, commercial and slightly alien. Many would be more than satisfied with this.
But there is no point in being a terrible snob if one is prepared to be swayed by arguments over niggardliness, meanness and pointlessness.
There is either a right way, or there is not. I condemn these evil traducers to the burning pits of Hades, with a broken WH Smith's piano-keys cassette player, a wobbly RAM pack and an overheating regulator. for all eternity.
Damn you and your curmudgeonly but eminently reasonable criticisms...
ReplyDeleteYep, you're right, there were all kinds of tradeoffs between what was feasible within the time and budget, different ideas about how to stay faithful to the original challenge (some people would say that multi-channel software trickery is more in keeping with the challenge than networking multiple machines) and what made for an entertaining event. If only 12 Interface Ones had been as easy to get hold of as 12 Spectranets, I would have been all in favour of doing it that way.
The Raspberry Pi could indeed have been replaced by a Spectrum, other than the fact that it was acting as the file server as well - the synchronisation program was just outputting a UDP packet every 1/50s consisting of a 2-byte timestamp. However, if we'd had any leftover Spectrum hardware, I would have been more inclined to use that for more voices. So yeah, it was all about bringing some present-day relevance (and linking to the theme of the museum's exhibition, about geeks through the ages) and the RasPi being the spiritual successor, and all the other arguments you've already shot down, dammit.
And I hadn't even got stuck into Vickers for choosing Mahler over, say, Bach. You can do a lot with Bach on a computer, but Mahler is resolutely tied to all that sloppy, emotional human stuff.
DeleteI am, of course, really delighted that this happened, and really sad that I didn't know about it in time to turn up and heckle from the floor. Before I worked for Sinclair, I was involved in a project to sell Spectrum MIDI interfaces (which I cocked up good and proper, but that's another story), and that included quite a lot of stuff about synchronising Spectrums to note events, how you could do it with the Speccy's internal clock (tl;dr - you can't) and general issues of making the hardware jump through hoops when it wasn't even equipped with legs. (There was a moment with one of Elton John's keyboard players and me on live TV, but, again, a story for another time...) So I can imagine with some precision the sort of things you went through in making this entirely mad idea come to life. As you sorta said in the video, you only learn how impossible something is after you'd committed to do it. Let that never stop us.
I have, of course, been unable to resist thinking about how to do something similar with ZX81s. And only ZX81s, with none of yon new-fangled Gooseberry Tarts or Arthurnets. I think I've got the basic notes and sync stuff worked out through the cassette port IO, but haven't found a satisfactory solution to loading the software in the first place. Custom ROMs seem cheating...