Imagining the impossible....

[Irish Pennant]

There already is original music/songs created by AI. I remember hearing on NPR about AI written music and that it's being performed my humans. Paraphrasing from memory, the AI took commonality/patterns from the top one hundred hits from each year for the past forty years and generated songs from that criteria. Components such as tempo, chord structure, timing, theme and genre. Some of the artist performing the music said that some of it had possibilities. In time, the music industry will not have a need for agents, for musicians or song writers, just image performers. They will perfect the technology and market the product to the youth and the youth will soak it up.

[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by Social Exodus

I've been a programmer since 1982 with my first Atari 800XL and I now work as a database administrator/programmer/web guy/middle ware guy, etc...

Let's see... Started on IBM 360 with punch tape in high school, went on to a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP1101 with seven and nine track reel-to-reel drives and floppies, bought my own Timex/Sinclair, moved up to an Atari XL, then Atart 130XE (remember SpartaDOS?), Atari ST, then Windows boxes and now share time between a Mac Pro, Windows Box, and Microsoft Surface Laptop.

Started programming in Fortran 4, went to a basic compiler, Action (C), and machine language. Eventually everything became app intensive and I let others do the programming.

Believe it or not, I did all of this as a recording engineer to prepare me for the inevitable move in audio to computer. And now I spend my life sitting at a console and computer!

Bob

[TBman]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

Let's see... Started on IBM 360 with punch tape in high school, went on to a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP1101 with seven and nine track reel-to-reel drives and floppies, bought my own Timex/Sinclair, moved up to an Atari XL, then Atart 130XE (remember SpartaDOS?), Atari ST, then Windows boxes and now share time between a Mac Pro, Windows Box, and Microsoft Surface Laptop.

Started programming in Fortran 4, went to a basic compiler, Action (C), and machine language. Eventually everything became app intensive and I let others do the programming.

Believe it or not, I did all of this as a recording engineer to prepare me for the inevitable move in audio to computer. And now I spend my life sitting at a console and computer!

Bob

A lot of you guys started before me, wow. I was a DOS guy with an IBM with two 5.25 floppies and 128k. Read the whole DOS handbook the first week, my girlfriend thought I went bonkers. Then I found the BASIC interpreter, upgraded to 256k (Hey a virtual drive now) then moved on to QuickBasic, (and faster and better computers) then Turbo Pascal with a little C later on and assembler, and inline code later.

I dabbled with the object orientated features later on with the Turbo Vision library included in the later versions of Borland/Turbo Pascal. Using this user interface library I coded the billing and employee time software for our accounting firm which we used for a few years. I was on the verge of porting both applications over to Windows when we discovered we could do the same thing with QuickBooks (thank you Intuit), which probably saved my sanity,

I did some strange things with my programming aside from a couple of games and "keeping track of stuff" software. I wrote a case tool for generating Turbo Vision menu code, I translated the Game of Life written in Pascal to assembler (don't as me why, lol) and I wrote a game/simulation that created a population of "strings" that were designed to tell an icon which way to go in a maze. Then the "strings" that were successful (based on a success rate of the maze) were then "mated" with other successful "strings", and then with one or two "mutated" string components, to see if over time these "strings" would evolve to the point that the icon would successfully complete the entire maze. They did after quite a few generations. (I also wrote a program that allowed me to design the mazes and save them as files to be read by the maze solution software.)

Probably the all time oddest thing I did was when I was in college, (I went late in life) I had a philosophy professor that gave us these problems, for instance, where a bunch of people went for a drive and one was wearing blue and another was named Bob and wore green and then he'd ask who drove the car while wearing red, lol or something equally strange. So I wrote code that used all the information and then solved the problem. He did this several times throughout the course. So I would code the software to print out the results and hand that and the source code of the program in as my assignment. I got an A in the class, but I never figured out what all of that had to do with philosophy, lol.

[Paleolith54]

Originally Posted by Athens

Anyone remember CPM...

I had an Osborne 1! Most people will have to look that up in a history book. "Portable" computer (like a small suitcase), tiny 5-6" screen integrated into the lid, two (!) floppy disk drives, state-of-the-art software bundle (Wordstar, Visicalc, others), I think a whopping 64K RAM... and the CPM operating system.

[TBman]

Originally Posted by Paleolith54

I had an Osborne 1! Most people will have to look that up in a history book. "Portable" computer (like a small suitcase), tiny 5-6" screen integrated into the lid, two (!) floppy disk drives, state-of-the-art software bundle (Wordstar, Visicalc, others), I think a whopping 64K RAM... and the CPM operating system.

I remember seeing those!

OMG we used Wordstar at work. Oh the agony of 8.3 character file names. I had to write software that used the client code system that I developed for our employee time and billing software to generate and organize encoded file names that when expanded told the client name, type of financial statement and date of the document. Our "blonde" secretary would lose the files on our huge 20mb hard drive, if I didn't do this. After losing literally hours searching for files over the course of time she forced my hand