A bit of tech history
A propos of nothing, here is a bit of my tech history. I lived in Tanzania (Afrika) from the age of three to six, where my parents had an Aristona 1/4″ open reel recorder. This was probably my first fascination into audio recording. It was slightly similar to the Philips N4407 recorder, and probably manufactured in the same year. I never did any tape splicing on it, but used the pause button for a few weird experiments during the 1970’s when we had returned to Groningen, The Netherlands. My hooray! moment in audio was 1978, when my cousin introduced me to portable cassette recorders. I used several portable cassette players, all mono, to record everything going on in my surroundings. This included interviewing everyone and recording special events such as new year’s eve 1979/1980. “My” first cassette recorder was my dad’s Realistic recorder (from Tandy, now Radio Shack I guess). I saved money to buy a Philips N2235, which had interesting features such as variable pitch. I then gradually started to invest in better equipment. A Teac V40 was my (extremely modded) stereo cassette recorder that I used to do a lot of editing. Some of this editing even made it onto Ferry Maat’s Soulshow. After saving 4000 guilders from my first job in the Academic Hospital of Groningen in 1986, I bought a brand new Revox B77 open reel recorder which ran at 7.5 and 15 i.p.s. This was the first recorder I used to do tape editing, always at 15 i.p.s. As much as I enjoyed doing 1/4″ editing, I think digital editing is much easier and as such better suited for creative editing. It’s also much cheaper! Back in 2003 when I studied at the School of Audio Engineering (SAE) we had to do a bit of open reel editing too, and it was fun to notice I still had the same routine, even though I hadn’t done any tape editing for some 10 years. As for computers, we had an Acorn Atom at school which I used for some stupid BASIC experiments around 1980/1981. A lot of calls to random functions, yes, hmmm…. My dad got a 8086 IBM XT computer running MS-DOS in 1987, but I didn’t do much with it at first. A bit of WordPerfect 4.something. Later on in life it was the “spare computer” in my parents’ house, and I experimented a lot with it using Borland’s TASM assembler and Modula-2. It was 1989 when I got my first own computer, which was an Atari ST 520 STFM I got from my parents as a birthday gift. I used it to run some MIDI programs to talk to my Yamaha DX 21 synthesizer and Kawai drummachine, but soon I drifted off in the direction of computer programming. I used TDI Modula-2 a lot. I taught myself C and C++ during my stay at filmschool (1988 - 1994), but never excelled in those languages. I also did a lot of programming in Toolbook II. These days I do a liiiiittle bit of php/mysql. In 1994 I re-discovered editing on my PC, a 486SX machine. It was the first time I noticed that my PC was fast enough to do audio editing in okay quality. Do mind, this was way before the internet was ubiquitous. I wrote two books on computer topics on non internet machines! My first own modem connection to the internet was in 1996, where I was hz37@xs4all.nl. I’ve owned several different PC’s running various versions of Windows and used programs such as SoundForge to do most editing. When I started taking piano lessons in 2000, I got more serious about music production and got a license for Emagic Logic Platinum. When it was discontinued on the Windows platform, I bought my first iMac in 2005. I now also have a Macbook Pro, which runs Logic Pro 7.2 and Protools LE with an MBox. And several other apps of course. At work we use Windows PC’s, running Protools HD. My girlfriend and I also own a custom built PC running Windows XP, but we’ll probably upgrade it to a more quiet core 2 duo machine some time soon.
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