MIDI

By 1981, the electronic music market had become large and chaotic and the Roland company saw the need for an industry standard. The MIDI 1.0 specification was released in August 1983, and MIDI became an industry-wide standard protocol, allowing any device of any manufacturer to talk to any other device of any other manufacturer.

The first Macintosh is released in 1984. Quickly realizing the creative potential for music using the computer’s graphical user interface, software developers quickly produce music software such as the MIDI Sequencing package Performer in 1985.

In 1985, Digidesign company founders saw the Fairlight CMI, and decided to emulate the computer based sample display but on the newly introduced Apple Mac computer. They developed their Sound Designer software for editing stereo audio files for use in digital samplers and CD mastering. Sound Designer becomes the basis of Digidesign’s Pro-Tools (1991) now the industry standard for digital recording.

The first versions of Max were initially developed by Miller Puckette in 1986 at IRCAM, Paris, as realtime control software for IRCAM’s 4X synthesizer. Beginning in 1988, David Zicarelli translated Max into a MIDI software product. He then brought audio modules into the Max environment to create Max/MSP, a graphical programming environment in which onscreen objects are connected via 'patchcords' to control the sound output from a Mac.