
Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer - usuallymatt
https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/13/radiohead-album-hides-an-app-that-only-runs-on-an-80s-computer/
======
jxramos
I 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?"

~~~
pasta
As 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.

~~~
cyberferret
My 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
As 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
You 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.

~~~
tehmaco
There's a short film on YouTube that explores that idea:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY)

It's a very strange experience hearing it!

~~~
wallflower
This is a video of Saara who is not a native speaker but who has an
extraordinary ability to mimic accents.

[https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw](https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw)

------
Joeboy
You 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
Where can I read more about it.

~~~
flohofwoe
Here's a nice short read with graphics:

[http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/articles/zx_spectrum_graphics-
ar...](http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/articles/zx_spectrum_graphics-
article_01.html)

Another spiritual successor to this 'image compression scheme' are compressed
texture formats in modern GPUs.

------
hkmurakami
Pretty sad they're calling this an "app". If it's dated to 1996, clearly it's
a "program"!

~~~
frou_dh
NeXTSTEP was around in the early 90s and used the file extension .app

~~~
lokedhs
The Atari ST operating system used .APP as well. This was in 1985.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
.app was rarely used though. Most things used the .prg extension.

------
Joeboy
> "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."

------
cyberferret
Very 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
I remember pirating games using my moms double casette deck in the kitchen.

It played the signal as audio while copying.

~~~
Fifer82
This never occurred to me until you said it. Did that work??

~~~
Joeboy
Up 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.

~~~
squarefoot
The trick was to add a little circuit to the player which would keep the
signal as clean as possible while reinforcing it. I did a similar thing many
moons ago by putting an old TTL chip into the C64 Datassette then wire its
gates as buffers. The input was connected to a point where I identified the
played cassette signal was present and the output after some light filtering
went to a RCA plug to which I would connect my Aiwa deck in record mode. Any
copy made that way would work much better than the originals: no more failed
loads after 25 minutes waits and no more azimuth twiddling to find the sweet
spot.

------
axaxs
Reminds me of the original Quake game on CD, which, if put into a normal CD
player, would play through the NiN soundtrack.

~~~
laumars
That'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
Yup, 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)

------
EvanAnderson
I 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
Aphex 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)

------
c3d
Isn'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? :-)

------
croon
That'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
[https://www.specnext.com/](https://www.specnext.com/)

~~~
croon
That'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.

------
Aaargh20318
Too 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
Spectrum's are legendary in the UK. I'm guessing that's the reason.

------
Xenomorphic

        After 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
You get Radiohead ;) but actually, I hope you can appreciate some of their
work.

------
divbit
Does x86 count as an '80s computer?

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mnem
Games came on vinyl in the 80s: [https://unicornbooty.com/video-games-
vinyl/](https://unicornbooty.com/video-games-vinyl/)

------
gustavcedersjo
The Swedish band Adolphson-Falk included a computer program in the innermost
track of its album “Över tid och rum” from 1984.

~~~
Joeboy
Various 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
Frank 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_\(video_game\))

------
api
Skinny Puppy had a hidden track like this too. I think it was on Brap but I
could be mistaken.

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zandorg
Don't forget Pete Shelley's XL1 which ran on a Spectrum from a vinyl record.

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bmsleight_
never thought I hear the loading sound of a ZX Spectrum again. Love it, Love
it.

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bahmboo
Of course it does.

------
jerry40
It reminded me a strage fate of Syd Barrett...

------
khaki54
author was so proud of coming up with "genre-bending" he had to use it twice

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mikekij
Maybe you need an OK computer.

------
minademian
great concept. i'd say it's more intelligent and meaningful promotion rather
than succumbing to hipsterism...

------
collyw
We didn't have "apps" in the 80's we had "programs".

~~~
Lio
...and no "coders" neither. We were programmers! But we were 'appy!

~~~
julianj
Folks also called themselves computer software engineers too

-edited for clarity

~~~
mattl
And hackers

