Steven Roberts playing flute in Arches National Park

Computing Across America, chapter 44 by Steven K. Roberts Arches National Park, Utah November 3, 1984 You have to be the reader’s mushroom. Judith of Telluride Judith and I walked amid sandstone formations that appeared as the whimsical carvings of some inspired god.  The rock, wind-sculpted for eons, was around us a museum of creative…

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This is a short excerpt from a chapter in Computing Across America called “A Nomad on Sabbatical.” My Louisiana trek had brought me to Hammond, and I immediately met some interesting folks and settled in for a while… a much-needed layover to rest, write, and frolic with friends. New Orleans was just down the road,…

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Creative Computing cover, Feb 1979

This article resulted from some tinkering in my Z80 environment in the late 1970s, using a homebrew synthesizer for output (see photo below). I did not have any grounding in music theory, so the method described here was merely a starting point based on the recent publication of Fractal mathematics by Voss & Mandelbrot. Music…

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Keyboard interface with cat

One of my early interests in “the computer hobby,” as it was called in the 1970s, was music composition and synthesis. My homebrew 8008 system (October 1974) was immediately paired with a Walsh-function waveform generator and top-octave synthesizer, and as those early heady years passed I turned my attention often to music tools. This article…

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