Mike I'm curious.
I work pretty often with pseudo random numbers for music. It's very important to have a wide field of random utilities, with different distribution, at hand.
Eventually I found very intriguing to look at the degradation of data inside the RAM of the Altair Clone.
I managed to sample a very low frequency waveform(1Hz sine) from my mac.
Once the signal is loaded into RAM I play it back and look at it at with a virtual oscilloscope. After that I turn off the Altair for some time.. In a few minutes if I turn on back again the Altair and I recall the player program (I have it in a PROM), the signal looks randomly degraded. If I wait longer the sample vanishes in clusters of random values. I had also programmed the switches to shift the value of the numbers at will.
I find this very attractive. The degradation of a signal is a kind of classic topic in new music. It was explored with tape and magnetic hysteresis process at first, then with the failure of CDs (writing scratches and signs on the surface), even radio network feedbacks were used.
"I'm sitting in a room" is a classic piece.
wow, a computer that can deal with metaphysics