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OT historical stuff follows: Paolo said: >Re: So THAT's what happened to ZIPI... I guess you read Lynx Crowe's site? I don't think that is much of a representation of what happened to ZIPI. I was there throughout that whole affair, witnessing it first hand. Much of what is said on Lynx's site didn't quite happen that way in the same universe I exist in. Lynx had nothing to do with the end of zipi, aside from causing huge schedule delays and preventing us from ever having working hardware. Lynx was writing code for the ZIPI hardware, and had never delivered anything that worked at all after a full year of work on what seemed to be an easy project. (he just had to implement the detailed specs we had written.) We had given up on him and were in the process of hiring somebody else when all that nonsense started. The "war" as Lynx calls it was initiated by Lynx, not Gibson, since we just wanted him to go away. His claims about the value of his worthless software are pretty funny, but his claims about the value of the OBMx are funnier still. That thing is the titanic of the synth world, hardly any of them were ever sold. I think as part of a settlement Gibson gave him all that code for zipi and obmx to do whatever he wanted with, since it certainly wasn't worth anything to anybody else. At 7:25 PM -0700 10/29/99, pvallad1@tampabay.rr.com wrote: >I remember Gibson at one time was in cahoots with UC Berkeley's CNMAT and >Zeta working on ZIPI, I was one of the people who worked on it, at Gibson's G-WIZ labs R&D division. Another poster expressed surprise that Gibson owned this, which seems a little odd since there is no secret about that. What's known as ZIPI was developed in Gibson's G-WIZ labs division, by Gibson employees, paid for by Gibson. We worked closely with people at CNMAT as well, and some initial ideas came from zeta. CNMAT has received very generous funding from Gibson for many years, BTW. >a network-based protocol that would supplant MIDI as >a control standard. Instead of MIDI's 32 or so KHz bandwidth, you have >bandwidth at least equivalent to Ethernet (which is much, much higher). >And since its network based, you can connect a bunch of devices into an >Ethernet-like LAN without the mess of lots of MIDI in and out cables. It wasn't "ethernet" speed (I guess you mean 10base-t). Zipi was spec'd as scaling bandwidth from 256Kb/s to 4Mb/s. But unlike ethernet it guaranteed a very fast real-time response for time-critical control signals, which we felt was necessary for communicating the expression data we expected our guitar-synth controller to generate. The lower layers of the network were a clever token ring network with some really great ideas in it. It was never working in the real world, btw. >I also remember hearing that ZIPI was dead in the water. has been for years. No development happened after mid '95. Most of the work was done well before that, late '93 - early '94. There was a different legal issue which froze zipi up, but I don't think it would have made a difference. Niche protocols like this don't have much of a future anymore, and there was never much support for zipi in the MI industry. The outcome would have been the same no matter what. >Now, I hear Gibson announcing something called GMICS >(http://www.gmics.org/) >The idea of using it as a replacement for MIDI is downplayed. It's being >pushed more as a digital audio networking solution. > >Will GMICS make it? Or is it doomed? Find out next year, same time, same >Bat-channel... What I like is, the people who developed it pronounce it "Gimmicks". kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@annihilist.com | http://www.annihilist.com/loop/loop.html http://www.annihilist.com/ | Loopers-Delight-request@annihilist.com