RE: [microsound] digital sound / digital aesthetics./ hyper-digital??

[Ian Andrews <i.andrews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

.. Even when the PC came on the scene, it was
>barely useful for any kind of serious audio work (the first IBM PC had a
>4.77 MHz processor, 640 KB of memory and no hard drives.

Don't forget the old Commodore 64.  About 2MHz processor (no?) and 64KB of
memory!  It was not too bad as a sound generating tool because it had a
dedicated sound chip (which was really a programmable analogue synth ).
PCs were simply office machines for a very long time.  You can't reliably
chart the history of digital/computer audio by looking at that timeline.
They were preceded by Amigas(first consumer sampling computer), Ataris, and
even Macs by many years.  I find that in the area in which I work that many
people are largely ignorant about the (consumer) pre-history of computer
sound/video. Many of the  bureaucrats of the arts and cultural funding
bodies hold the belief that computer generated music/video began around
1996, when it could finally be done on PCs.