s-100
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MIDI gear of the 80s: 16 channels of want
It was 1987 in a dark Orange County new wave recording studio when I first saw virtual notes scroll past my eyes on a nine-inch Mac Plus screen. The Yamaha DX-7 and Sequential Prophet 5 were lit up like a space ship, and I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to go to there. I wanted to do what Front 242, Blancmange and New Order were doing. I was hooked: high on aftertouch. So began my wallet-killing, girl-repelling high school obsession and summer-break career. I worked in the keyboard department at Guitar Center, bought racks of gear at cost, and set my sights on becoming the next great electronic music sensation of the late 80s. Or... not. So what was left behind? Several lame Skinny Puppy ripoffs, a few decent dance tracks that I still have hidden away on cassettes in my office closet (of course, I don't have a cassette deck on which to hear said tracks), and plenty of fond memories about some beautiful old electronic music gear. I present here for your perusal some of my more memorable axes.
DoDoNA's S-100 mp3 player doesn't need no stinkin' ergonomics
Clearly, skinny jeans aren't yet as popular in Korea as they are in Western lands. For if they were, we'd never see chunky cube-shaped players like this S-100 here, and the world would definitely be poorer for it. Taking its design cues from the mesmerizing Mintpass Cube, with a smidgen of old school iPod buttonry, this device boasts a 1.1-inch OLED display, FM radio, built-in speaker, voice recording, and a slightly pedestrian 4GB of integrated memory. No, it's not exactly sterling value at nearly $170, but we have the suspicion that the S-100 was never targeted at the unimpulsive analytical types anyway.
