ABSTRACT
Most of the history of musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) revolves around NAMM meetings and some very passionate individuals who kept trying and trying to make a system work. A list of MIDI specifications was agreed upon before the January NAMM meeting in 1983 and several instruments were demonstrated working together. Creating a MIDI specification is all well and good but it wouldn’t have meant anything without having instruments to use it. Instrument to instrument connections was a great first step for MIDI but there had been previous efforts using control voltage and other proprietary systems and so by itself it wasn’t enough to make it a “universal” format. The 5-pin DIN connector was the original MIDI interface but with computers there had to be a method of connecting MIDI cables. One of the most popular MIDI devices is the drum machine and there have been a number of successful machines over the years.
