Fairlight CMI: The Definitive Interview
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Paul Schlusser flew in from Australia that morning, and I couldn't wait to squeeze every story out of him 🎹 Paul joined Fairlight in 1984 and ended up running the Series III software team: 15 engineers, 14 CPUs in one machine, hundreds of thousands of lines of assembly, all written on the Fairlight itself. He takes me from Tony Furse's Qasar M8 to Stevie Wonder buying the first CMI, the rivalry with Synclavier, flowers from Billy Gibbons and the CAPS sequencer he had to tell the boardroom would never be finished (someone even left a cartoon on his desk about it).
Then the story turns 😲 Paul tells me how the original Series IIx source code was rescued from a rain-soaked dumpster, how he got it running ten times faster on a modern computer, and why that became Freshwater Instruments and the FI50A, a new CPU card for the original CMI. And at the end, he agrees to come back and show us something.
🔗 PEOPLE & LINKS FROM THIS VIDEO
🎹 Paul Schlusser — Fairlight Series III software manager, now Freshwater Instruments 👉 https://www.freshwaterinstruments.au
🧠 Freshwater FI50A — the new CPU card for the Fairlight CMI Series I, II and IIx 👉 https://www.freshwaterinstruments.au/fi50a
🖊️ Freshwater Lightpen — their recreation of the original CMI light pen 👉 https://www.freshwaterinstruments.au/lightpen
📺 Chris Blythe — the previous episode of this series 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNniKVcTnzk
🎞️ Extra footage and archive scans courtesy of Freshwater Instruments
💬 For me it was seeing a pen draw notes on a screen. What was the first piece of gear that made you feel you were living in the future?
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⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Last time, with Chris Blythe in LA
0:28 Paul, straight off the plane from Australia
1:21 Series III: 16 voices, 16 bits, 14 CPUs
2:33 The first sampler and the first sequencer
2:59 From physics student to Fairlight
4:52 How the Fairlight was born: Tony Furse and the Qasar M8
7:45 An entire CPU on every voice card
9:21 Hundreds of thousands of lines of assembly
12:03 Running a 15-person software team at 25
13:08 A graphical interface before the Mac
14:20 Built from scratch, right down to the monitor
17:54 Selling business computers to fund the dream
21:58 Who was the musician? Michael Carlos
26:02 Stevie Wonder bought the first one
27:52 Fairlight vs Synclavier
29:44 The fax from New York
32:16 One look and feel for the whole Series III
34:45 Debugging with logic analysers
35:30 Version 5.4 and flowers from Billy Gibbons
37:01 CAPS, the sequencer that would never be finished
43:33 Undo, in 1985
44:00 How Freshwater began
46:47 Source code rescued from a dumpster
48:06 Running the original code ten times faster
50:28 Why it's called Freshwater
51:06 The FI50A CPU card
52:02 A passion project for 300 machines
55:55 Recreating the light pen
57:21 What if Fairlight hadn't stopped?
58:37 Coming back with a prototype
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