Elderly floppy drives play Ghostbusters theme - video

NOT FOR the first time, a retro-loving geek has programmed a roomful of floppy disk drives to play a tune. But this new video is a particularly satisfying example in the genre – a cover version of the Ghostbusters theme.

The music is created by instructing the drives to write or read particular patterns of data, just as they would if used for their proper purpose. The drives make noise only as a by-product of writing to disks.

Laboriously tricking them into playing a tune as their heads vibrate at different frequencies is a display of geek prowess with something of the 'wow' factor you might get from a scale model of a cathedral made of matchsticks.

Anyone who has ever seen Ivan Reitman's 1984 comic ghost-hunting caper will remember the song, by Ray Parker Jr, as fondly as the movie. And the crunchy sound of the drives fits his 80s funk particularly well.

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