1950s electro

The earliest known recording of music produced by a computer - a machine operated by Alan Turing, no less - has finally been made to sound exactly as it did 65 years ago. The performance is halting and the tone reedy. It starts with a few bars of the national anthem, then a burst of Baa Baa Black Sheep, followed by a truncated rendition of Glenn Miller's swing hit In The Mood. ("The machine's obviously not in the mood," an engineer can be heard remarking when it stops mid-way.) But the rudimentary audio track is a landmark - the first time that music played on a computer is known to have been recorded. It was captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester, where the Ferranti Mark 1 - the world's first commercially available general purpose computer - was based.