Re:But who cares about such old history? (Score 1)

As someone who has had the distinct pleasure/agony to actually have "played" on one of these ancient pieces of equipment, an original Moog and Mini-Moog, let me tell you that Electronic Music is the ULTIMATE in Geekiness (can you say computer programmer meets electronics repair person meets composer?). While it may be "old history" and boring and not geeky to the younger set, the invention of the programmable synthesizer, especially the Moog Synthesizer, not only ushered in the beginning of one of the most exciting times for Electronica; it also was the beginning of making ALL things computer more accessible to the everyman. The full Moog took up an entire room but Moog and a few others took their concepts and made them "small" for portable/"everyman" use and this required re-engineering the circuits so that they would do the same "job" as the "big boy" but would be compact and fit in a small case. Furthermore, all these early synthesizers had to be programmed by hand (i.e. punch cards, etc), to allow playback of the music. All of this was one factor that led to folks at DEC/IBM to take a look at what was going on over in the "Electronic Music World" and consider designing smaller computers for personal use and to use some of the innovations in circuit design from the Electronic Music World to bring you your 100Gig hardrive and 256MB USB Stick. So every time you turn on your computer, you should thank the folks from this boring old ancient world for their forethought and their "geekiness" because they did it the hard way...built in their garage and didn't have someone else's code to "work from".