Christmas — open reel tape

Merry Christmas! It’s the perfect holiday for opening presents and open reel tape.

Many of the media we have shared this season started as consumer or broadcast media for audio — and why not? Consumer media sales dwarfed computer media sales media-for-media for a long time. Many of you may remember the cassette tape as your first computer media. Though some computer companies included cassette drives directly in the chassis or sold standalone cassette drives, most home computer systems used a regular portable cassette player with a headphone jack. The actual tape media was essentially a half-width version of the quarter-inch open reel audiotape used in many home hifi systems. That format was, in turn, half the width of half-inch broadcast tape. Since the interface from the tape drive to the computer was sometimes no more than an audio patch cable, with a user prompted on-screen to press play or stop, an existing reel-to-reel deck could be used just as easily. You could load a new game that way on Christmas morning and play music through your HiFi that evening for Christmas dinner.

Today, I have the latter from my own collection — an Ampex 541 tape recording of “The Long Christmas Dinner” — an opera composed by Paul Hindemith and Thornton Wilder based on Wilder’s earlier play of the same name. I bought this tape used.

Here’s the cast for that recording (written also on the box)

Details on the box suggest that the recording may be from 1970 — from a production I have not yet identified — perhaps Juilliard? Many of the players have a connection to Maryland and at least a few spent a career in the theater. The recording predates by decades the first commercial recording of this opera in English. Thornton Wilder was said to be very reluctant to have his work set to music — the known productions of this opera have been done in coordination with the Wilder estate.

Britannica commissioned a dramatization of the play in 1976, available online from Britannica here.

As for Alice, perhaps I will get in some good hacking this holiday week. I wish you all a season of happy hacking as well. Here’s the Alice program that generated the floppy media insert to this year’s holiday card.

(sync
  (pu)
  (fd 200) (rt 90) (fd 100) (lt 90)

  (pd)
  (circle 130)
  (pd)
  (circle 17.5)
  (pu)

  (let (
         (center (pos))
         (w (setwidth .3))
         (media (quote
           "01: paper tape"
           "02: flexi disc"
           "03: mag strip"
	   "04: punch card"
           "05: floptical"
           "06: microdrive"
           "07: lto tape"
           "08: pcmcia"
           "09: mmc"
           "10: laserdisc"
	   "11: cmx 600"
           "12: minidisc"
           "13: 400kb 3.5"
	   "14: 720kb 3.5"
	   "15: 1.44mb 3.5"
	   "16: 2.88mb 3.5"
           "17: flashpath"
           "18: smartmedia"
           "19: memory stick"
           "20: qic-80"
           "21: thumbdrive"
           "22: cartridge"
           "23: bernoulli"
           "24: 9-track"
	   "25: open reel"
         ))
         (arrow (lambda (shaft) (sync
           (lt 45) (pd) (fd 10) (pu) (rt 180) (fd 10)
           (lt 90) (pd) (fd 10) (pu) (rt 180) (fd 10)
           (rt 135) (pd) (fd shaft) (pu) (rt 180) (fd 20)
         )))
       )
    (sync
      (setpc "red")
      (pu) (fd 135) 
      (arrow 20)
      (fd 135) (rt 180)
      (home)
      (setpc "black")
 
      (lt (mul (div 360 25) (sub (length media) 1)))
      (foreach (lambda (str) (sync
        (pu)
        (gotoxy (car center) (cadr center))
        (fd 37) (pd) (printscale str .08) (pu)
        (rt (div 360 25))
      )) media)
    )
  )
)
  

I’ve been running this under the JavaScript implementation of ADVENT on Linux in iSH on my iPad.