Hmmm . . .
They should have exploded (in slo-mo) at the end.
Reg Hardware Retro Week Logo Most techies would struggle to find a use for old floppy drives, instead either throwing them out or leaving them to gather dust in the attack. If you had enough time on your hands, though, you could always piece several together and program them to play... music. Built for display at Purdue …
Just think - in 30 years when we all have been using USB flash disks and SSD's, the kids won't be able to do anything like this with our old junk hardware. Hell, they won't even be able to play with CRT's, or hard disk magnets, or RAM/ROM that you can bit-bang, or even mice you could steal the balls out of.
Maybe that's a GOOD thing. I'm not sure how many hours were wasted trying to do this (not that I haven't wasted a thousandfold as many hours myself on similarly worthless jaunts) but I'd have expected something better.
Strangely, if you'd managed to read some data back based on the sound of the floppy under normal access, I'd be more impressed (e.g. side-channel attacks like the smartphone "I know what button you pressed by what the acceleration sensor read" attack).
My favourite (so far) is still "What is Love" from A Night at the Roxbury
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Has anyone tried this on their HP Scanjet by selecting SCSI ID 0, then hold down the green 'scan' button on the front whilst powering on the scanner. Its pretty easy to do requiring no tech knowlege at all just remember to set your SCSI ID back:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKeXOa2sYSw
By stepping back past track 0 the head would "ping" against the end stop. Do that at the correct rate to generate a note, and you could get quite a wide range of music. Tended to trash the drives if done too much though, so people would only demo it once or twice. The progarm was called something like "drive music" I think.
I've been meaning to do something like this with servo motors for a while now. Three part harmonies on a motion platform.
IIRC, the Renault F1 team programmed their engine to play 'we are the champions'. And I mean *engine*. This was back before the ECU and general F1 creativity ban had accelerated - at that point the engines would go to 20,000+ RPM, and with essentially no flywheels they could switch between RPMs almost instantly. Nutty stuff - a 900hp music box, and probably a $50,000 performance...
No youtube link as I'm writing from my playbook and am too tired to slog through that sort of thing.
(...and a hearty 'fuck you' to the FIA, for emasculating F1 so much that in a few years the engines will barely be turning over faster than a carbeuretted pushrod V8 with a cast iron block does now in NASCAR...)