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Jazz musician Herbie Hancock demonstrates the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer on Sesame Street, 1983
- Thread starter Bill-kun
- Start date
commodorejohn
Veteran Member
Man, Sesame Street was hip back in the day.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
It’s a Fairlight Series II; the computer is a custom job, this isn’t just cards plugged into an off the shelf PC. If the specs I can dig up are correct it’s a dual CPU 6800 machine with between 64 and 256k of RAM main memory and a whole shedload of ADC/DAC hardware with its own per-voice memory buffers. The system sold for around $30,000 or so.
Bruce Tomlin
Experienced Member
I'm pretty sure it used 6809, not 6800. And go look up the Chris Blyth videos on building a Fairlight CMI from parts, apparently mostly parts from stuff that Fairlight made a few years later with mostly the same boards.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
It looks like there was a "regular" Series II had dual 6800s, and a year later they introduced a "IIx" which used the 6809. And to make it even more complicated it looks like it was possible to have, say, a Series II where the OS was running on 6800's but it also had a MIDI board installed which had its own 6809 CPU on it...
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
... If you want some "light reading" here's a manual for the "QASAR" computer the CMI was built around; this is the 6800 version used for the Series I and early Series II.(*) This machine was developed with musical applications completely, 100% in mind, but supposedly it was briefly marketed as a general purpose business computer. But only very briefly.
Apparently the later 6809 versions could run both a port of the original "QDOS" (not to be confused with the QDOS that later became MS-DOS) and a special version of OS9.
(* edit: Actually this manual, which is from 1980, also mentions the option of a CPU card that has both 6809 and 6800 CPUs on it. Since these machines were very modular and intended to be customized the implication here at least is even some "Series I" machines might have had both kinds of CPU. So... yeah, I guess unless you've actually peeked under the hood of a particular Fairlight CMI you really can't say for sure. Apparently the Series III kept running the main OS on the 8-bit CPUs and added 68000s as I/O processors, some cards had their own CPUs on them...)
Apparently the later 6809 versions could run both a port of the original "QDOS" (not to be confused with the QDOS that later became MS-DOS) and a special version of OS9.
(* edit: Actually this manual, which is from 1980, also mentions the option of a CPU card that has both 6809 and 6800 CPUs on it. Since these machines were very modular and intended to be customized the implication here at least is even some "Series I" machines might have had both kinds of CPU. So... yeah, I guess unless you've actually peeked under the hood of a particular Fairlight CMI you really can't say for sure. Apparently the Series III kept running the main OS on the 8-bit CPUs and added 68000s as I/O processors, some cards had their own CPUs on them...)
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