In the summer of ’84, I was sweating over what I would do for my Special Problems project to get through my Computer Engineering Technology degree. One day I glanced at my Moog Rogue synthesizer and … Eureka!
The program I went through focused heavily on data acquisition and also, a friend of mine had demonstrated the first software sequencer I had ever seen a year before. Thus was born the Digital Recorder project in which I built an interface to play and record my little Moog into the VAX at school. I am happy to say I got an “A” on the project and even happier to say it got me out of a life of working on shipping docks.
I had bought the Moog because of all the synth bass happening by the early eighties. My fondest memory of the tunes we did - we were your standard RnR band, 2 guitars, keys, bass and drums - was when we broke down to just keys, synth bass and drums and did Axle F, the theme to Beverly Hills Cop. It was electronic and funky!
Anyway, here’s a picture of a Z-80 and its PIO still in one of my parts bins. What a pack rat!
