Depeche Mode too I think (or did they? their sampling took off with Some Great Reward).
Edit: I think I’m wrong, I just have this bizarre memory of being sat in Constantinou’s hair salon waiting for a trim and reading an article about their use of sampling for Some Great Reward- may have been an E-mu Emulator instead.
My oldest direct computer memory is not music related, and not of my own, but something my younger brother bought in 1970s: A Sinclair Mk14 (predating the ZX80 by several years), which was sold as a kit for partial self assembly. If memory serves it was programmable only in machine code, had a calculator-style hexadecimal keypad and had a 7-segment LED calculator-style display as its VDU. Think very early Raspberry Pi!
IIRC it had 0.5kB RAM(!) -and at great expense he bought an additional 0.5kB memory board. (And the tale goes that at Uni others with a Mk14 would offer their girlfriends for the night in exchange for borrowing his additional RAM board, but there is no evidence of whether this was true or, if so, what said GFs had to say on the sibject!)
Into hifi myself, I didn’t understand why he wanted to spend his money on that - but though at Uni he read something completely unrelated to computers, upon graduating he immediately got a job as a computer programmer.
Started with ZX81 at home. Research Machines computer at school. My pal had a Spectrum.
Agreed. I’m lucky to be volunteer at TNMOC and am lucky enough to be able to talk and demonstrate to visitors the WW2 machines used to break Lorenz, so Tunny, Robinson and Colossus. I still am in awe of the people who designed and operated these machines. Unfortunately I wasn’t there at the same time as Tony Sale but we do have a couple of the original rebuild team around.
Friends had ZX81, I used Research Machines and BBC at uni. Didn’t buy a Jupiter Ace. Bought an Atari, but gave that to a girlfriend’s son. First real computer was Apple SE/30 a monochrome machine with a hard disk. Wrote my PhD on that using it as a word processor. Apple replaced three hard disks without any cost to me, so I became addicted to Macs.
An astonishing generation. I met Christine Brooke-Rose late in her life, a linguist who had native French and German, she went to BP as a translator straight from school. In later life she learned to use computers and satellite TV as she lived in France. So many clever and inventive people at BP. Well done you for volunteering.
Must have been amazing.
I was simple!
He did play us Stockhausen, but I got a taste for that too at the time.
Apparently named after a hydrofoil, never knew that.
There’s an iPad software CMI apparently though reviews mixed.
Still cool, great computer after the ZX 81.
I posted a link some time ago to an old BBC Horizon programme about computer graphics which inspired me.
Was there one for electronic music? I seem to recall the Fairlight’s display of samples using FFT from somewhere.
Also for the PC. I’ve got the downloads, but never tried it
Just found this, very interesting:
The whole system software was <0.5 MB (8” floppy I think), not surprising but sobering when you think of current software bloat.
Mine are from my school days in the early eighties. Some of our physics teachers teamed up with the local university to start a computer club. That lead to informatics as a class later on. I have no recollection of the hardware used with the discs, though. We used ELAN, which was similar to FORTRAN, as language.
I have similar memories from the school days. Our math and physics teacher (1980- 81) was very much into this
ABC 80 (Advanced BASIC Computer 80 )
Good to see some love for the BBC Micro. I used these for my PhD research. I was going to use Apple 2s but they were replaced by the original Mac which was not usable for my participants (people with aphasia caused by stroke, mostly very elderly). The BBC Micro was very versatile, reliable, and easy to use. BBC Basic was a damn fine language and encouraged structured programming. My other toy was a Prime mainframe.
Waltham! Blimey there’s a name, I remember they did an all-in-one unit, the poor mans Ferguson Studio 6 as I recall!
“Gabriel was also interested in selling the CMI in the United Kingdom, and he and Stephen Paine formed Syco Systems to distribute it for £12,000. The first UK customer was Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones, followed by musicians including Boz Burrell, Kate Bush, Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons, Richard Wright and Thomas Dolby.”
Not much of a computer buff but I have fond memories of the Philips G7000 games console (not quite as good or popular as the Atari) and the the Commodore 64.
My friend’s dad also made himself an Apple 2 complete with a wooden monitor casing (if that’s what you call it) perfectly matched in shape and paint colour. Lander was one of our favourite games but I can’t find any images or references to it in searches (only Lunar Lander which is not the same game).
