This is the web site of John Walker, founder of Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, living in Switzerland for a long time now, and still a hacker (in the good sense) despite being very wealthy.
Reminds me of how these days it's almost impossible to register a patent. Some of the techniques I used in some of my open source projects are probably just innovative enough to be patent-worthy but it's too expensive and the potential financial returns are unclear.<p>Tech nowadays is a two class system. The innovator needs to have a certain pedigree or else their innovations don't register.
The tradition of using shift registers for automated music generation very much lives on! These days they are typically called "Turing Machines" (I know, kinda of confusing for us CS folks), due to the influence of a popular version which came out in 2012: <a href="https://www.musicthing.co.uk/Turing-Machine/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.musicthing.co.uk/Turing-Machine/</a>
Great to know about one of the brains behind Intel 8008 microprocessor - Harry S. Pyle. An interview with him at CHM - <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702017" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270201...</a>
Reminds me of this device: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPp5oYnps0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPp5oYnps0</a>
Don't build this.
Don't bring it to school.
Don't show it to anyone.<p>This is the kind of thing that get you expelled, jailed, or shot.