Apple II Bits

Last month I quit my job at MIT, taking with me the Apple IIGS that had been in my office for nearly three years. I’m not yet settled enough at my new place of employment to inquire if it’d be appropriate to install a 30-year-old machine in my office — but it’s only a matter of time.

Fortunately, my computer wasn’t my former employer’s only connection to the Apple II. The MIT alumni association‘s podcast, Slice of MIT, recently aired an episode with Eran Egozy ’95, who co-founded the video game developer Harmonix. In "What Makes Rock Band Rock?", Egozy gives credit to the Apple II for getting him his start. "When Eran was 15, his parents bought him an Apple II computer. He and a friend got together and decided to find a way to make the computer play back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony," says the show’s host. "This wasn’t just one instrument of the symphony: the pair found the whole symphony score, complete with all of the different parts for the string instruments, the brass, and the woodwinds — and every day after school, they would translate the music into computer code. Every ten seconds of the score took 3–4 hours to code."

Here’s the whole episode:

MIT and the Apple II: a winning combination!

(Hat tip to Kate Repantis)