Playing Boards of Canada on a Vintage Computer

Boards of Canada’s music has always had a vintage quality to it, thanks to the duo’s warbling samples and analog reliance. Thus it only makes sense for their music to be played on a nearly 70-year-old computer, the DEC PDP-1. Earlier this summer, the Computer History Museum used their PDP-1 to record a cover of “Olson,” which originally appeared on Boards of Canada’s 1998 breakthrough album, Music Has the Right to Children — and it sounds surprisingly good.

There’s something really delightful about seeing Peter Samson load the song into the computer using punched paper tape and then throwing a series of physical switches to start the music. What makes this even cooler, according to @dryad.technology, is the fact that “[t]he PDP-1 doesn’t have sound, but it does have front-panel light bulbs for debugging, so they rewired the light bulb lines into speakers to create 4 square wave channels.”

In this day and age of streaming and smartphones, the video looks like some sort of wonderfully arcane ritual. (Via Kottke, who has more information about the PDP-1.)