[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

[Jerry Leichter]

I first heard “The Flight of the Bumblebee” performed by an IBM 1620 in the late 1960’s. The machine was slow enough that you listened to its EM emissions on an AM radio. Making music this way was a fairly common trick on the machine. Eventually people wrote “music compilers” if increasing sophistication. There was one that accepted quite a bit of notation and would produce programs to play the music and use the paper tape punch to produce percussion for accompaniment. 

There were many similar games played. Someone figured out how to modulate the sound from a line printer (by careful choice of characters sent and line lengths) to produce tones as the band of letters went back and forth.  Now *that* could really weird out an operator!
                                          -- Jerry