Re:MIDI 2.0 Prototyping announced
by TheRealPomax on Saturday January 19, 2019 @12:06PM
(#18947917)
That's not Roland being genius, though. That's kind of literally one of the things sysex messages were added to the MIDI 1.0 spec. It's also why it's taking so effing long for webmidi to become a standard, because allowing sysex would mean your browser could in theory tell your midi device to brick itself.
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In fairness, Roland founded the MMA and wrote most of the MIDI spec. The odds are fairly good that Roland did invent SysEx.
I thought Dave Smith was primarily responsible? Just to put another notch in Silicon Valley’s belt, I guess.
Dave Smith was the first to get on board with the project and made substantial contributions to the design of MIDI, but it was Ikutaro Kakehashi who started the whole endeavour. MIDI was heavily influenced by DCB, a proprietary interface developed by Roland in 1981.
Yep, when I did a little work for the Midifighter[1] controller, I used sysex to send configuration (but not firmware updates) to the device, to be stored in EEPROM. It was a nice and seamless mechanism.
[1] https://www.midifighter.com/ I made the first version of the configuration tool.