They very first piece of commercial Apple software — a primordial flavor of BASIC originally released in 1976 that took thirty seconds to load — has been perfectly and authoritatively extracted from a yellowing audio tape and converted into a 38 second MP3, playable in iTunes. Plucky, hyper-intelligent beardos are now dissecting the file and learning its secrets, but their findings are a bit above my head. You can read them in full at the link below. All I feel worthy of commenting upon is the song itself, which is rather catchy — a Music to Make Love To Your Old Lady By as interpreted by antediluvian 70s cyborgs.
1200 Baud Archeology: Reconstructing Apple BASIC from a Cassette Tape [Pagetable via Crunchgear]
1. 2. 3. – Takedown Notice. Methinks Apple doesn’t buy the concept of abandonware.
Have they tried running this through the SETI@Home analyzer?
Dave A.
i just played the mp3 and my screen suddenly went monochrome with a single flashing cursor. i had to write a web browser in basic to send this message.
@1:
Tell that to the free-to-download copies of MacOS on Apple’s ftp site.
Man! That first change (~17) is bad ass! And just when you start rocking on it, it hits the break down(~27).. yknow that little metally fill , awesome!
The endings a little weak though.
Tim Hecker used this as the beginning of his set at Mutek 2003. Rippin!
if you enjoy the sounds of apple basic I, you should check out databending: the creative misuse of data. a number of electronic musicians have used these types of sounds; i personally released a 12″ record of songs composed entirely of sounds i got from sonifying raw data on my hard drive.
*sigh* 1200 baud. I haven’t heard that in years
Happy days as a youngster loading games into the C64 from tapes that got as long as 5 minutes, some of which had to be turned over and played on the reverse side, too.
Then we got a disc drive, and it was as big as the entire computer, but man did that make life easier…
I made a quick and silly remix of this in Ableton Live, because it’s better than doing actual work!
Hosted on Tindeck ::
http://www.tindeck.com/audio/my/vcoj/Apple-1-Basic–Lord-Kook-Remix-
:)
I like their old stuff.
Back in the day someone wrote a freeware command line MS-DOS app, called simply “play”. It would play any type of audio file and would convert data files to screaming glitchy blasts of sound. I always thought it would be rad to make music with. Too bad they killed MS-DOS.
sounds very much like “luke i am your father”
only backwards, slowed down, and ran through a compositor
with extra sprinkles of “ha ha”
I’ll add this to my collection of binaural beats, see if I get any energy from it.
Listening to that made me thing I was logging on to a phone line BBS again.
We’re all cracked, aren’t we?
You mean FreeDOS?
There’s a typo on that tape label. To run it, it’d be E000G, not E000R.
Anon (#9): That was a lot of fun, thanks.
@#9 – brilliant!
@4
Where? Oh, you mean FreeBSD? otherwise people wouldn’t buy OS X they would download it.
@18
No, I mean MacOS, exactly as I said. For example here is system7
http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/System/Older_System/System_7.0.x/