Ah, the many eras of corporate music. Canyon.mid exemplifies the late 80s / early 90s aesthetic - gets me fired up to optimize my multimedia strategy.
The current era is mostly inspiring 4 chord repetitions with muted guitar and piano, with B-roll of cinematic nature footage and racially diverse businesspeople shaking hands. Also jaunty ukulele riffs with dance claps and some kind of "oh oh ayy-oh" vocal hook.
What creative bounties will the coming decades bring?
In answer to your closing rhetorical, I'd like the throw a curveball: Corporate Businesswave, the genre of truly creative artists riffing on soulless corporate jingle culture. Plenty of 80s/90s aesthetic to go around here. I personally love "Money Can Buy Happiness" and "Mark to Market" by New Century, "Pump and Dump" by Shadow and Mirrors, and "Insider Trading" by Michael Weber.
The infinite four chord inspiration sound is quite dreadful (shame on you, Hans Zimmer), but I do hope we never revert to the times of KPMG, we're strong as can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo. If you haven't heard it, first prepare some ear bleach before you click.
Isn’t the ukulele thing straight from Israel Kamakawiwo`ole’s take on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, or a bleak imitation thereof?
I want my 60s-70s orchestral muzak back. Complete with grainy 24fps footage of sunny cities with enormous futuristic-looking business centers and viaducts, successful-looking smiling people riding those ginormous cars to work. Keith Mansfield, David Lindup, Alan Hawkshaw. Big names of library music.
The synthwave era in comparison sounds somewhat decadent. But I like it too.
I feel like there was at least one additional generation of corporate muzak between these two movements, but I am slightly too young to really put words to it. I remember bank and tech commercials being full of xylophones and marimbas around the turn of the century. Think the soundtrack to American Beauty. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual definitely touches upon it too.
Somehow, this made me think of Amtrak when they used a jazz song from the Pat Metheny Group as their radio jingle. That advertisement felt surprising to me at the time, and stimulated oddly nostalgic day dreams about sophisticated train trips that I never actually experienced...
There was an easter egg in Windows 95 for clouds.mid.[1] You had to create a folder and rename it a few times, and then it would play the song[2]. Even hearing it now takes me back to a simpler time...
It wrapped media objects into compatible OLE 1.0 objects for insertion into OLE containers (example: office documents, presentations etc). It was a component of OLE before later versions and before OLE became ActiveX, and learned to embed stuff by themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding#O...
IIRC - fuzzy old memories, but I think you could use it with OLE to combine a few different embedded OLE sources into one document, e.g. a Microsoft Draw vector piece and a Media Player MID into one component that could be embedded elsewhere.
Very useless. Most Win 3.1 machines with 1-4MB RAM could barely even start MS Draw without churning swap like they were trying to make butter....
I did. It wasn't very cool after all. I know what you mean about the icon, too. And why wasn't it easier to get that kind of cool custom icon for one's favorite, and still current, MS-DOS apps at that time? Frustrating.
Love it. virt also did a little tune called "here's your seven day forecast" that's also from that era and really nice, like a stereotypical weather channel tune.
I think "computery" music (synthesized on the user's device from individual notes) reached its peak with tracker/keygen music: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ That was maybe the last moment before video games switched to recorded music, and chiptunes became a nostalgia genre.
I didn’t know how much I wanted to hear and see this. Much nostalgia.
It suddenly occurs to me that I always thought I missed the most interesting times in computer history, but I actually experienced the majority of major changes (about DOS onwards).
It just didn't get more Windows than Canyon.mid. 90s corporate Memphis in musical form, the kind of thing you'd hear over a 3D computer animation -- or opening a corporate training video. Its full title was "A Trip Through the Grand Canyon" or similar; no surprise, that was also the subject of many a 3D computer animation back in the day.
A few years ago I was playing with Karplus-Strong synthesis, and I decided to dump canyon.mid into it. Note that there's no drums, I just dumped every note into the synthesizer. Also I think there were some numeric bugs with my code.
I had an Iomega Zip drive, too! So cool, but the higher capacities were too expensive and the parallel adapter didn't work everywhere. I forget if there were compatible discs, not made by Iomega, that were cheaper?
I don’t know about cheaper, but Fuji, HP and photography related companies made disks.
Completely unrelated, but the SCSI versions made them pretty much plug and play with tons of hardware. There is an old Roland sampler I have made in ‘88 that uses one, and Zip disks leave floppies completely in the dust. It’s truly night and day on every level.
Yes, Iomega eventually licensed disk production to a few other companies. I know for sure that Maxell and Verbatim made them, and Wikipedia says that Toshiba, Fuji, Epson and NEC also produced some.
When they were originally released, I believe the first model was SCSI-only and cost $199. Disks were $20 each and held 100MB. Eventually the price of disks dropped a bit, until they were around $11 or so in multipacks the last time I bought any.
They also had backwards compatible 250 and 750 MB drives, but I don't know how well they ever sold. I never saw either in person. I think by the time they hit the market CD-R drives and media had dropped in price so much that Zip disks weren't economical as either a backup or file-transfer media.
Ah, my first tech job. It was an amazing ride going from a few hundred thousand dollars to a two billion dollar company. I bailed when things started to tank.
There was a puzzle in the MIT Mystery Hunt a few years ago where teams were given a physical Zip disk (amongst other outdated tech) and had to figure out how to read its contents :)
Since we're all reminiscing here, let me throw in Michael Walthius's Echoes from 1994 which totally dragged me deep into the MIDI collecting world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyhRd0Wsew
In the 90s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers were MacOS and Windows.
There were at least real, meaningful attempts at competition in the consumer space with, most notably, OS/2 and BeOS. (OS/2 is seen as a commercial failure these days but quite a lot of people ran it.) MS-DOS from Microsoft was also competing with IBM PC DOS and Digital Research/Novell DR-DOS.
In the early 90s, Atari TOS, RISC OS and AmigaOS were not completely down for the count yet.
In the UNIX workstation market you still had SGI IRIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and more.
Now, looking even in that space -- well, maybe there's a Linux box or two, but more likely you're going to find even more macOS and Windows.
[+] [-] QuadrupleA|4 years ago|reply
The current era is mostly inspiring 4 chord repetitions with muted guitar and piano, with B-roll of cinematic nature footage and racially diverse businesspeople shaking hands. Also jaunty ukulele riffs with dance claps and some kind of "oh oh ayy-oh" vocal hook.
What creative bounties will the coming decades bring?
[+] [-] taylorfinley|4 years ago|reply
A good jumping-off point: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39pqsBTsb9UNYv1dXbZpff?si=...
[+] [-] tgv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splatzone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WesolyKubeczek|4 years ago|reply
I want my 60s-70s orchestral muzak back. Complete with grainy 24fps footage of sunny cities with enormous futuristic-looking business centers and viaducts, successful-looking smiling people riding those ginormous cars to work. Keith Mansfield, David Lindup, Alan Hawkshaw. Big names of library music.
The synthwave era in comparison sounds somewhat decadent. But I like it too.
[+] [-] jim-jim-jim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedrow|4 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/everonward_trans....
[+] [-] saltcured|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headmelted|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/q26aQKRjebI
[+] [-] pnut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gchucky|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69883/musical-easter-egg... [2] https://soundcloud.com/brianorr/clouds
[+] [-] mrleinad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subroutine|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protean|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w
[+] [-] madjam002|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znpy|4 years ago|reply
I first heard that in an english-course CD-rom and always thought it belonged to that course and was thus lost forever!
Thank you for letting me re-discover this thing!!!
[+] [-] acheron|4 years ago|reply
Another one I remember well that apparently was more obscure than I realized is ISLAND.MID. It's the last one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ome3vfadYvs&t=586s
[+] [-] pram|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twoodfin|4 years ago|reply
Did anyone ever use it for its mysterious but intended purpose?
[+] [-] kvakvs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewave|4 years ago|reply
Very useless. Most Win 3.1 machines with 1-4MB RAM could barely even start MS Draw without churning swap like they were trying to make butter....
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enneff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Underphil|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/s_XYWwCu8vM
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotheraccount9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrblampo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _nickwhite|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cousin_it|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
It suddenly occurs to me that I always thought I missed the most interesting times in computer history, but I actually experienced the majority of major changes (about DOS onwards).
[+] [-] bitwize|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FeepingCreature|4 years ago|reply
I kind of like this version anyways though https://soundcloud.com/feepingcreature-1/canyonmid-on-a-brok...
[+] [-] adamredwoods|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EVdotIO|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kadin|4 years ago|reply
When they were originally released, I believe the first model was SCSI-only and cost $199. Disks were $20 each and held 100MB. Eventually the price of disks dropped a bit, until they were around $11 or so in multipacks the last time I bought any.
They also had backwards compatible 250 and 750 MB drives, but I don't know how well they ever sold. I never saw either in person. I think by the time they hit the market CD-R drives and media had dropped in price so much that Zip disks weren't economical as either a backup or file-transfer media.
[+] [-] codazoda|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjbprime|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfosco|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabujp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMSdaPTuV8E
[+] [-] mproud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shp0ngle|4 years ago|reply
In the 2020s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers are MacOS and Windows.
(However, to be fair, all the rage is now in phones, where Windows is surprisingly non-existent. Apple's OS is still the other one, though.)
[+] [-] einr|4 years ago|reply
There were at least real, meaningful attempts at competition in the consumer space with, most notably, OS/2 and BeOS. (OS/2 is seen as a commercial failure these days but quite a lot of people ran it.) MS-DOS from Microsoft was also competing with IBM PC DOS and Digital Research/Novell DR-DOS.
In the early 90s, Atari TOS, RISC OS and AmigaOS were not completely down for the count yet.
In the UNIX workstation market you still had SGI IRIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and more.
Now, looking even in that space -- well, maybe there's a Linux box or two, but more likely you're going to find even more macOS and Windows.
[+] [-] nebula8804|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamiewildehk|4 years ago|reply