[TUHS] Monitoring by loudspeaker
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo
tih at hamartun.priv.no
Sun Aug 23 18:58:19 AEST 2020
Robert Clausecker <fuz at fuz.su> writes:
> When the computer is in a tight endless loop, the accumulator takes the
> same series of values every time it's in the loop. Thus, instead of
> white noise you get a sound whose frequency is the clock frequency of
> the machine divided by the number of cycles spent by one loop iteration.
A buddy and I did something somewhat related back in the early eighties,
when we were teaching ourselves programming, using, among other things,
his Tandy TRS-80 home computer. We discovered that a cheap "transistor
radio", sitting close to the computer, would be affected by the noise
generated by it, and then we figured out that if we didn't tune it to a
radio station, we'd get only the noise. Leaving that on as we worked on
a program, we got familiar with the sound of the code, and became able
to follow the execution by the changing patterns -- and if it did get
stuck in a loop somewhere, we'd not only hear it, but we would also have
a pretty good idea where it happened.
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
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