Another new member

[jorgen.bergfors at idg.se]

Hi everybody. Let me introduce myself with a little anecdote:

My name is Jorgen Bergfors and I live in Stockholm, Sweden.
I began building the Formant in the beginning of 1978. I was 19 years old then.
In 1981 I was working as a service engineer for Siemens (mainframe) computers. 
When we had a shortage of personel, an engineer from Siemens in Munich came up 
to help us. His name was Hans Kolber. When we were travelling to a customer, 
Hans asked me if I had any schematics for a 8085 microprocessor system. I said 
no, I'm not into microprocessors but I am building a synth. Really, he said. 
I'm doing that too! That's what I intended to use the microprocessor for.  It 
turned out that Hans had built a large Formant system, that he had in a studio 
in Munich.
When I was in Munich (where the Siemens headquarters are) to learn som new 
products, I visited the studio. Hans then suggested that we visit a friend of 
his who was making synthesizer kits. That friend was Dieter Doepfer. He had 
just come out with his polyphonic modular system (PMS). He also had the String 
Phaser, his first product. He had everything in a flat in central Munich and I 
bought some of the PMS kits. He also serviced commercial synths, at the time of 
our visit he had a modular Moog in, that supposedly was used to record the hit 
"Popcorn".
Unfortunately, polyphonic synths are a lot of work to build and gets very 
complicated if you want all sorts of interesting features. At the same time, 
commercial polyphonic synths became affordable for the first time.
Also with the advent of the DX7, analog synths were considered old fashioned. 
Therefore my synth project was put on ice or -- so I thought then --scrapped.
But as you all know, analog synths later aquired "vintage" status. So a coulpe 
of years ago, I started to plan on using the PMS and Formant modules for a 
"super" monophonic modular synth. I have done a lot of thinking and drawing for 
the concept of this synth. That might be the subject of another letter to this 
list, if there is any interest.

Best regards
Jorgen Bergfors
bergfirs at idg.se