SPECIFICATIONS
The Fairlight CMI I is marketed in 1979.
CMI stands for Computer Musical Instrument.
It is based on the architecture of the Fairlight Qasar prototype, and it has most of its features:
- Dual 8-bit 1 Mhz Motorola 6800 processors
- 8 channel cards with 16Kb waveform RAM and discrete filter (8 voices of polyphony)
- 64Kb system RAM (QDOS)
- Two 8″ floppy drives: double sides, simple density disk (512Kb)
- 6 octave keyboard, featuring key velocity sensitivity, with 3 sliders and 2 switch buttons assignable to various parameters (vibrato, volume, sustain … )
A second keyboard is proposed as an option (without the control buttons) - Monochrome monitor which was used to visualise waveforms and to edit parameters: resolution was 512 x 256 pixels
- Alphanumeric keyboard
- Lightpen
- Additive synthesis with FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)
- 24Khz 8-bit sampling
- Sequencer (Page C)
- MCL: Musical Composition Language, created by Peter Vogel, which made the CMI I the first machine using this type of language. It was soon followed by the Synclavier.
Layout on the CMI-25 motherboard
| ID | DESCRIPTION | SLOT |
|---|---|---|
| CMI-02 | Master card: control of 8 channel cards, ADC sampling, timerfunctions for sequencer and MCL | 1 |
| CMI-01 | Channel card with 16Kb waveform RAM Discrete filter | 3 to 10 |
| Q045 | Graphics card | 9 |
| CMI-07 | Analog interface card (optional): 16 inputs/outputs to control analog synthesizers | 11 |
| Q148 | Lightpen card | 12 |
| Q096 | 64Kb system RAM card | 13 to 15 |
| Q032 | Processor control card | 16 |
| Q026 | Dual 6800 processors | 17 |
| QFC2 | Floppy disk controller | 18 |
| Q025 | 16Kb video graphics RAM | 20 |