💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 09 › 24 › chamomile.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:47:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-14)
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Again, no synthesizers were harmed in the making of this track. Also I have no idea where I got some of the soundfont files. The price was right…
One could argue that a computer is a synthesizer, or at least can fake one pretty well. Drum machines are programmable, but they are not called drum computers. So at some point—"I'll know it when I see it"—a machine becomes computer-y enough by having enough programmability points, which may not mean much, but at least alliterates.
<computer> A machine that can be programmed by its user.
gemini://thelambdalab.xyz/phlog/2023-08-26-Program-your-computer.txt
So by that definition a drum machine is a computer. Probably.
On the computability front, computers were originally humans, mostly female:
Anna Winlock was one such computer, hired in 1875 by the Harvard Observatory to do computations on their unreduced observations for 25 cents an hour. By placing computers on the clerical tier and with women willing to accept low pay for their work, the Observatory and other organizations began to hire women as computers. By 1880, all of the computers working at the Harvard Observatory were female and had been hired by director Edward C. Pickering. The group was referred to, somewhat crudely, as “Pickering’s Harem,” signifying the beginnings of computation being gendered as female.
https://cmsw.mit.edu/age-female-computers-francesca-schembri/
Later on, the "bomba" used to break German ciphers is generally not held to be a computer. ENIAC is technically predated by the Zuse Z3 though something reminds me to not mention the war.
tags #synthember