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Re: Would love your input, stories

Also with the lost of Windows 3.1 - I still have Brian Eno's album for Koan (as a floppy disc www.discogs.com/Brian-Eno-Generative-Music-I/release/1452850) that I can't play any more. It's not like having an old 8-track you can't play, because the brilliant thing about that album was you could listen to the record unfold over days. I also lost a ton of software when Mac went from PowerPC to Intel. From: berefarno@gmail.com Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2016 20:01:25 +0800 Subject: Mourning DOS Re: Would love your input, stories To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com I have felt left behind by a technological rapture several times.  So much wonderful DOS software stopped working with Windows 95 - I particularly felt the loss of RAVEL, MusicBox and Sound Globs. Jim Binkley's RAVEL system - a dedicated parallel language that only ran on an MPU-401. I remember having an extra-large laptop so I could run and MPU-401 in it. I have kept a 1992 Pentium running DOS 6 since then just to use it (even though I moved on to things like PureData) Here is stuff about RAVEL ftp://ftp.cs.uu.nl/pub/MIDI/DOC/ravel.doc (it's not a doc, it's a text file you can read in your browser). People like Warren Burt used RAVEL in the 80s  Jon Dunn's MusicBox, which let me play with a pretend hardware sequencer I couldn't afford long before such things were commonplace   http://www.algoart.com/musicbox/algmbox.html It evolved into the Kinetic Music Machine. There was another one - SoundGlobs? - had temperament setting so you could write 19-tone algorithmic stuff. You could program in a Gamelan, or automate a Raga machine. Yes, it sounded truly awful by today's standards, but it had a kind of magic to it. It stopped working an age ago Funny how with time using the old box has come to be almost a performance practice thing, like playing a harpsichord or a viol da gamba. I have an oriiginal Roland U-110 MT-32 and things like that. I know I could do more and more easily with an iPad, but I love how I can make it do what I want (the old DOS computer).