🚀 go-pugleaf

Another "musical computer":

In 1961, when both computers and I were a lot younger than we
are today, I was working at an IBM 7090 comp center at a research
institute in Sweden. A senior scientist at the institute had
invented a new type of random number generator, and had analyzed
it theoretically with some rather advanced number theory. I helped
him run a whole lot of statistical tests on the 7090. Everything 
looked fine, and the scientist started talking about us writing a 
paper together, which was quite an honour for me who had just graduated. 
Unfortunately, the 7090 turned out to be musical ...

The IBM customer engineers used to keep a small radio on the
console, and used it to listen to the machine when they were 
doing service on it, as has been described here before. The
radio was normally off, but when I ran one of my final tests on
the random number generator, it happened to be on. The random
number generator made the radio sound like a (US) police car! It
whined up and down, with a period of a second or more. Now, the
7090 was the super computer of its time, with the incredible 
speed of 0.2 MIPS, so this implied an auto correlation over a
range of tens of thousands of random numbers, where none should
exist theoretically and none could be measured over short ranges.

The scientist understood nothing, but didn't dare publish any 
paper until he did. It still has not been published!