Slopfest #10 · 1936 · Vienna
Infinite Tape Night
A machine that reads symbols off an endless tape. We supplied the tape. It was not endless.
Museum status: Displayed once, briefly, in a Würstelstand window.
- Venue
- Musikverein, the cloakroom
- Attendance
- 63
- Guest of honour
- Charlie Chaplin (got tangled in the paper tape in a way that looked rehearsed)
- Fun fact
- 1.4 km of tape, 97% the letter S
What happened
The committee unrolled a paper strip from the Musikverein toward the Ring and asked guests to write one symbol each. By midnight it reached the Staatsoper and was mostly the letter S. Charlie Chaplin got tangled in it in a way that looked rehearsed. Nobody could determine whether the festival would ever halt, so the building switched off the lights at 2 a.m.
Elsewhere in 1936
Alan Turing publishes 'On Computable Numbers', describing the abstract computing device now called the Turing machine.
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