Rock band hid Commodore 64 program on a vinyl album

A Commodore 64 program has been discovered on an old vinyl album. It concerns the album Electric Eye by the Christian rock band Prodigal. The now 35-year-old album contains a program with quotes from Albert Einstein and Jesus.

The discovery was made by YouTube channel 8-bit Show and Tell, which recorded the analog audio of the program and transferred it to a cassette, after which the program could be run on the now 37-year-old computer system.

The program is coded in the Basic programming language and contains a quote from Albert Einstein and a quote from Jesus Christ. The video shows the steps of decoding the easter egg. To do this, the YouTube user uses Audacity to convert the audio signal into usable Commodore data.

Bands are more likely to hide messages in audio from singles and albums. The Dutch band What Fun! code in Basicode for the band’s logo at the end of their eighties single Let’s get digital. The radio program Hobbyscoop broadcast code over the radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which listeners could record on cassette tapes to run the corresponding programs on their home computers.

8-bit Show and Tell has shared a download link in the description of the video, which allows users to run the program themselves via an emulator. The program can also be run on an original Commodore 64, provided users have the necessary hardware.

Prodigal consisted of vocalist Lloyd Boldman, guitarist Rick Fields, bassist Mike Wilson with Dave Workman on drums. The band was active between 1975 and 1986, scoring several hits on Christian radio stations with songs such as Invisible Man, Scene of the Crime and Emerald City. The singer passed away in 2014, just hours after all Prodigal albums were re-released.

The program in question. Photo via 8-bit Show and Tell