There's a song by Kraftwerk called Pocket Calculator. The English version of the song has the following lyrics (taken from http://www.songlyrics4u.com/kraftwerk/pocket-calculator.html ) :

I'm the operator with my pocket calculator
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator
I am adding and subtracting
I'm controlling and composing
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator
I am adding and subtracting
I'm controlling and composing
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody
By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator 

I have written an extremely rudimentary program for the HP48 graphing calculator that plays the 'little melody' heard in the song after the line about "By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody". It works great on my HP48GX, and sounds neat when played in sync with the song. The timings for the beeps might have to be adjusted for other HP calculators. The code for this program follows:

1489 .07 BEEP 
.07 WAIT
1013 .07 BEEP
.01 WAIT
632 .07 BEEP
.01 WAIT 
1489 .07 BEEP
.03 WAIT 
1013 .07 BEEP
406 .07 BEEP
1.15 WAIT
1489 .07 BEEP 
786 .07 BEEP
627 .07 BEEP
363 .06 BEEP
1022 .07 BEEP
.01 WAIT
2713 .073 BEEP

I did it sometime back in 2003 or 2004, I think; I used Audacity to figure out the pitches and durations of the beeps and the intervals between them. I only got around to making a web page about it more recently, around September 2004.

Long after I wrote this myself, I realized that someone had beat me to it; when I had searched the web in vain to find someone else who had done this, I neglected to search the comp.sys.hp48 newsgroup. Searching this newsgroup for "kraftwerk" reveals that someone named Teddy Hegeborn wrote a program to do this for an earlier version of the HP48 by no later than Friday, April 22, 1994. I've tried using the old program on my HP48GX, though, and it doesn't seem to have the right timings.


(index)