Nassau Herald

Hunt was born in Trenton in 1952. He studied electrical engineering at Princeton University where he helped start a chapter of the Society of Black Scientists and Engineers, and then earned his masters and Ph.D from Stanford University. At Bell Labs he worked on the UNIX program, contributing to computer programming Hunt-Szymanski and Hunt-McIlroy algorithms, with colleagues Thomas Szymanski and Douglas McIlroy.

Public Relations at Bell Labs felt this image was scandalous at first, but New York Times publicity gave it clout as legitimate artwork. The following year, it was shown in a technology-themed exhibition, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, at The Museum of Modern Art, further elevating Harmon and Knowlton’s composition. The work is a representation of dancer Deborah Hay. Knowlton also developed BeFlix (short for Bell Flicks), an animation system.

Leon Harmon and Kenneth Knowlton

Image Courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

After a colleague accidentally created an interesting array on a computer screen, Noll made his own compositions using the computer. Using the program FORTRAN, he experimented with this medium. Noll’s work is collected by major museums. Noll also advised on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where he and John Pierce designed a picturephone for set decoration.

A.Michael Noll

Image Courtesy of the artist

A. Michael Noll

Image Courtesy of the artist

Ed Zajac

Zajac programmed a computer to create an animation of a satellite orbiting Earth, using the ORBIT program created by Frank Sinden.

Featured in the Popular Science, March 1939

The Voder and Vocoder were both created by Homer Dudley of Bell Labs in the 1930s, as a way to reduce bandwidth for radiotelephone communications. The Voder reproduced human speech by pressing keys similar to a piano. Its mate, the Vocoder (Voice Operated reCordER), turned the human voice into data. The Vocoder led to the SIGSALY encryption machine, used during WWII.

Seeking to improve existing sluggish computer systems, engineers Ritchie and Thompson had designed their own program by 1969. Ritchie and Thompson sought to make operating systems less complex. UNIX made it easier for engineers to create their own programs because they could combine existing ones.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Pierce partnered with Max Mathews, from the Visual and Acoustics Research department, on this album. It is self-described as “Selections of Music Composed and Played by Mathematicians — Both Human and Electronic.” Several songs were composed by “throwing specially designed dice” corresponding to random numbers that showed what chords to use. Some of the songs were composed through computer programming, using a punch card. The compositions were then performed by an IBM 7090 computer and “Digital to Sound” Transducer.

Published in Computer Music Journal

This machine, known as the Hal Alles Synthesizer after its inventor, was created to model digital telephone transmission and switching, and anticipate auditory issues. The synthesizer could replicate up to 30 different musical instruments at a time. In 1977, the Motion Picture Academy celebrated the 50th anniversary of talking movies with a demonstration of the synthesizer by rock musician Roger Powell. Powell later went on to become part of Apple’s Audio Lab. The Hal Alles synthesizer led the way for digital music as well as digital keyboards.

Photo by Emmanuel Ghent

Spiegel started at Murray Hill as a “resident” but was then hired by the Labs to contribute to Hal Alles’ synthesizer. Spiegel was one of the first musicians to use computers to compose songs. She also experimented with digital and video art during her time at the Labs. After Bell Labs, Spiegel worked on the Music Mouse program for Apple.