The program simply loaded, and waited for you to press START. When you did, you were treated to a distorted but unmistakeable rendition of 6 seconds of 'You Really Got Me'.

Another hacker first told me about it, and played it over the telephone. Soon I got my own copy (through mailing diskettes, or maybe a BBS), and found myself endlessly pushing the start button for my own entertainment and to try and impress my friends.

Of course, the Atari had (at least when THEKINKS came out) no more than 48k. I seem to recall the binary was more like 32k. And, it must have been 8 bit samples. So, at 6 seconds my calculations tell me it must have been playing something like 600 samples per second or 4.8kbps.

Now, of course, I listen to gigabytes of stereo at 128 kbps and it's as ordinary as can be.

I seem to remember there was some sort of sound digitizing package for the Atari. My guess is, someone bought it, made the recording and passed it around.

The funniest part of all was, it was the Van Halen version, and no one every noticed.

-- MattWalsh - 05 Nov 2003