What happens inside the RAM

[gio74]

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

[AltairClone]

Very interesting! I've never seen much information about the distribution of power-on values in different types of volatile semiconductor RAM. Maybe you could provide data for some Microchip products!

Mike

[gio74]

Nice idea Mike.
It is very interesting to see the process.
As soon as I port a couple of utilities to windows I will post here the links to the software for PC and Altair to sample slow waveforms and play it back from RAM
:D