Like the author, I was fortunate enough to be inspired by some of the early electronic music including Carlos and minimalists like Glass, and Reich. My public high school was very spoiled and we had an EML 101, 200 and 400, as well as some early MIDI stuff - CZ-101, RX-7. I'm pretty sure we had one of those Teac tape decks as well, because the mention of simul-sync triggered some recognition deep in my brain.<p>Unlike the author, we had sequencing with the EML 400 which is still one of my favorite analog sequencers, and we had an Alpha Syntauri which was an Apple II based system with a custom expansion card that did additive synthesis and sequencing (it was pre-MIDI).<p>It's really crazy to think of how hard it was in the early days to just go out and buy things that we can now do with a cheap or free app on our phones. Recently with Dave Smith's passing, I was reminded of how huge of an impact his co-invention of MIDI was. My personal intro into the stream of electronic music equipment history was just as MIDI had been recently introduced and before digital synths replaced so many analog ones.<p>We've now come full circle in that analog modular synths have had a huge renaissance and there's a fair amount of even cheap stuff which has both MIDI and analog CV/gate. Moog, Sequential Circuits, Roland, Yamaha and Korg have all reprised their most popular respective pre-MIDI analog machines.<p>It was struck by how he ended up wire-wrapping various CMOS stuff together in the name of making music. While not everyone takes up a soldering iron, it's often the case that so many electronic music people get lost in building their systems starting with various levels of building blocks. Some may be content with finding a few special VST plug-ins for their DAW, while others may solder PCBs for some of their analog modules from a kit.<p>I founded a company to create a General MIDI synth for the Palm platform. I did this mostly because I wanted to recreate the experience of sequencing with an EML 400, and the Palm was a relatively popular platform and affordable way to have a touch screen (albeit resistive and 160 x 160 black and white) to interact in real time with the synth module. This was not exactly a huge success, but much like the author, my burning desire to interact with a certain sort of sequencer lead me to learn a lot about electronics and product development. That I don't regret.<p>I'd love to hear a follow-on to his musical journey, but reading through some of his blog, it seems other advocations have taken his focus.