Et uddrag fra hans wiki-side (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Smith_(engineer) ~
Herfra skal der lyde et stort tak for alle de fantastiske instrumenter! RIP ~Smith had degrees in both Computer Science and Electronic Engineering from UC Berkeley. He purchased a Minimoog in 1972 and later built his own analog sequencer, founding Sequential Circuits in 1974 and advertising his product for sale in Rolling Stone. By 1977 he was working at Sequential full-time, and later that year he designed the Prophet 5, the world's first microprocessor-based musical instrument and also the first programmable polyphonic synth, an innovation that marked a crucial step forward in synthesizer design and functionality. Sequential went on to become one of the most successful music synthesizer manufacturers of the time.
In 1981 Smith set out to create a standard protocol for communication between electronic musical instruments from different manufacturers worldwide. He presented a paper outlining the idea of a Universal Synthesizer Interface (USI) to the Audio Engineering Society (AES) in 1981 after meetings with Tom Oberheim and Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi. After some enhancements and revisions, the new standard was introduced as "Musical Instrument Digital Interface" (MIDI) at the Winter NAMM Show in 1983, when a Sequential Circuits Prophet-600 was successfully connected to a Roland Jupiter-6. In 1987 he was named a Fellow of the AES for his continuing work in the area of music synthesis
After Sequential, Smith was President of DSD, Inc, a Research and Development Division of Yamaha, where he worked on physical modeling synthesis and software synthesizer concepts. In May 1989 he started the Korg R&D group in California, which went on to produce the innovative and commercially successful Wavestation synthesizer and other technology.
Smith went on to serve as President at Seer Systems and developed the world's first software based synthesizer running on a PC. This synth, commissioned by Intel, was demonstrated by Andy Grove in a Comdex keynote speech in 1994. The second generation of this software synthesizer sold over 10 million copies, as a result of being licensed to Creative Labs in 1996; it was responsible for 32 of the 64 voices in Creative Labs' AWE 64 line of soundcards.
/Rune/