Re: How It's Made

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Greg Buchner wrote:
> Just watched an episode of "How It's Made" and they had an Apple IIe on 
> it. It was used in making rolls for player pianos.  The data was on a 
> 5.25" disk fed into a Disk ][ and it just ran a simple program that 
> controlled the machine doing the punching. Probably had a specially 
> built controller card.
>
> You can watch part of this segment, including showing the IIe here:
>
> > http://science.discovery.com/videos/how-its-made-self-playing-pianos.html

Nice clip!

This could be done with just a parallel card in the Apple, and
some external logic attached to the punch.

Since there are 88 keys, plus a few control pedals, demuxing it all
on the Apple card would lead to a pretty big cable.  Since there will
be solenoid drivers between any card and the actual solenoids, it would
make sense to demux the commands outside the Apple, closer to the punch
control solenoids.

-michael

NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

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