The IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (ISPW) was a hardware digital audio workstation developed by IRCAM and the Ariel Corporation in the late 1980s. In French, the ISPW is referred to as the SIM (Station d'informatique musicale). Eric Lindemann was the principal designer of the ISPW hardware as well as manager of the overall hardware/software effort.
It consisted of up to three customized DSP boards that could be plugged into the expansion bus on a NeXT Computer (a "cube"). The ISPW could then run a customized real-time audio processing server on the hardware boards controlled by a client application on the NeXT.
Each ISPW card had two Intel i860 microprocessors (running at 80 MFLOPS). An additional card with eight channels of audio I/O was also available for multi-channel sound recording and playback. A three-board ISPW provided what was at the time unsurpassed signal processing and audio synthesis power on a single workstation. A single ISPW card cost approximately $12,000US (not including the computer), which made it prohibitively expensive outside of research institutes and universities.
And the I860 board:
The main server software developed by IRCAM for the ISPW was called FTS ("Faster Than Sound"). The main NeXT client application was a graphical program called Max, developed by Miller Puckette. A commercial version of Max (without the FTS server) was licensed by IRCAM to Opcode Systems (and, later, Cycling '74).
Max/FTS eventually migrated to a software-only application for SGI and DEC Alpha computers. It is the direct predecessor to jMax.
A motherboard is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the crucial electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit (CPU) and memory, and provides connectors for other peripherals. Unlike a backplane, a motherboard usually contains significant sub-systems, such as the central processor, the chipset's input/output and memory controllers, interface connectors, and other components integrated for general use.
NeXT, Inc. was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business use. The company was founded by Apple Computer co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs after he was forcibly removed from Apple in 1985. NeXT introduced its first product, the NeXT Computer, in 1988, followed by the smaller NeXTcube and NeXTstation in 1990. These computers had relatively limited sales, with only about 50,000 units shipped in total. Nevertheless, their object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces were trendsetters of computer innovation, and highly influential.
A sound card is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprietary workstation computers such as the NeXTcube. It was later ported to several other computer architectures.
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
In computing, an expansion card is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot on a computer's motherboard to add functionality to a computer system. Sometimes the design of the computer's case and motherboard involves placing most of these slots onto a separate, removable card. Typically such cards are referred to as a riser card in part because they project upward from the board and allow expansion cards to be placed above and parallel to the motherboard.
The Intel i860 is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning of the 1980s. It was the world's first million-transistor chip. It was released with considerable fanfare, slightly obscuring the earlier Intel i960, which was successful in some niches of embedded systems. The i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s.
Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, is a proprietary 16- or 32-bit parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers until the mid-1990s. Its name is commonly abbreviated as "MCA", although not by IBM. In IBM products, it superseded the ISA bus and was itself subsequently superseded by the PCI bus architecture.
In computing, a windowing system is a software suite that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP paradigm for a user interface.
Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is an audio plug-in software interface that integrates software synthesizers and effects units into digital audio workstations. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware in software. Thousands of plugins exist, both commercial and freeware, and many audio applications support VST under license from its creator, Steinberg.
A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece.
Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations.
Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open-source project with a large developer base working on new extensions. It is released under BSD-3-Clause. It runs on Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android and Windows. Ports exist for FreeBSD and IRIX.
Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus.
The NeXTcube is a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured, and sold by NeXT from 1990 until 1993. It superseded the original NeXT Computer workstation and is housed in a similar cube-shaped magnesium enclosure, designed by frog design. The workstation runs the NeXTSTEP operating system and was launched with a US$7,995 list price.
Since the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s, IBM and other vendors have created PC-based IBM-compatible mainframes which are compatible with the larger IBM mainframe computers. For a period of time PC-based mainframe-compatible systems had a lower price and did not require as much electricity or floor space. However, they sacrificed performance and were not as dependable as mainframe-class hardware. These products have been popular with mainframe developers, in education and training settings, for very small companies with non-critical processing, and in certain disaster relief roles.
The Sogitec 4X was a digital audio workstation developed by Giuseppe di Giugno at IRCAM (Paris) in the 1980s. It was the last large hardware processor before the development of the ISPW. Later solutions combined control and audio processing in the same computer like Max/MSP. 4X built on the achievements of the earlier Halaphone, capable of timbre alteration and sound localization.
Crystal River Engineering Inc. was an American technology company best known for their pioneering work in HRTF based real-time binaural, or 3D sound processing hardware and software. The company was founded in 1989 by Scott Foster after he received a contract from NASA to create the audio component of VIEW, a virtual reality based training simulator for astronauts. Crystal River Engineering was acquired by Aureal Semiconductor in 1996.
The Music Kit was a software package for the NeXT Computer system. First developed by David A. Jaffe and Julius O. Smith, it supported the Motorola 56001 DSP that was included on the NeXT Computer's motherboard. It was also the first architecture to unify the Music-N and MIDI paradigms,. Thus it combined the generality of the former with the interactivity and performance capabilities of the latter. The Music Kit was integrated with the Sound Kit.
SoundGrid is a networking and processing platform audio application made by Waves Audio and developed in cooperation with DiGiCo.
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