This Ancient Apple II Makes Music For Even More Ancient Player Piano

I love this little mini-episode of How It’s Made. It takes an almost antediluvian bit of tech — rolls for automated player pianos — and then shows how two Apple computers almost as ancient help make them.

This is just retro Mac porn. It gets a little titillating when you see the pianist recording a player piano score on an old PowerPC Mac, but wait until you see how the player piano tune is converted from MIDI into a player piano roll via loading the score on a floppy disk onto an ancient Apple II hooked up to a massive punching machine. Then it’s just as good as it gets.

[via TUAW]

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.