1 Oct
2009
1 Oct
'09
6:44 p.m.
On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Sep 30, 2009, at 6:10 PM, Steven Hirsch wrote:
There's been earlier discussion on this list, but short answer is that you
are mistaken :-). The Synclavier was built around New England Digital's
own bit-slice CPU originally developed for their ABEL minicomputer system.
Probably based on AMD 29xx parts, although I do not know that for sure.
Really? I was actually pretty sure about that. I never saw the innards of
the machine myself, but I will happily stand corrected!
I forget what the acronym means, but it has nothing to do with the ABEL
PLD language. NED was started by a couple of folks from Dartmouth
College, Sidney Alonzo and Cameron Jones. A mutual friend at the time
described Cameron as "capable of scrolling code on the inside of his
eyelids" :-).
I suspect they produced the ABEL minicomputer to get some cash-flow coming
in while the Synclavier was being productized. The work on the
synthesizer started at Dartmouth. During the heyday of NED, they endowed
the college with the slickest electronic music studio you ever laid eyes
on. An entire lab full of Synclavier keyboards and terminals running
time-shared off a greatly expanded CPU.
My company also did a lot of work for Dartmouth and it was always a gas to
be in that room! From memory, I think we installed a bunch of audio
patchbays and multi-core trunk cables, but that was almost 25 years ago
and things are a bit vague.
--
Being a vintage computer and synthesiser fan, I'd
love
to get a Fairlight CMI for restoration/care/actual use
so if anyone has any Fairlight CMI model they would like
to either sell or trade let me know. Can be EU or US.
Mmmmm, Fairlight.
Years ago (1988 or so?) my friend Mike in Delaware had a Synclavier II.
That thing was damn impressive. Sadly he no longer has it. Unless I'm
mistaken, there's a MicroVAX-II in there! A company I ran in the 80s did a lot of audio
systems contracting work with
NED and I recall seeing terminals all over the place that were logged on to
the in-house ABEL system. I think they used it for inventory, billing,
etc. All the support software was developed in the ABEL environment AFAIK.
I've gotta assume this is different from the ABEL PLD design language. I've
never heard of it, what is it?