[sdiy] MAM book

[Veronica Merryfield]

I thought some of you might like this text.

Veronica


      NOTES ON .PDF VERSION OF MUSICAL APPLICATIONS OF MICROPROCESSORS


The Acrobat (.PDF) files in this directory contain the entire "Musical
Applications of Microprocessors" text and graphics. There is a file for each
chapter and also separate files for the front and rear matter. The chapter
files range in size from 2MB to 9MB and the total of all 23 files is 102MB.
Below is a list of points to be aware of before reading or especially printing
these files.

1. These files are SCANS of Xerox copies of the original book pages.

2. Accordingly the text CANNOT be searched and any extractions will be graphic
   images which can only be manipulated and edited with a bitmap editor such
   as Paintshop.

3. Please use the Acrobat bookmarks in each file and the index in REAR.PDF to
   find things.  There is also a master bookmark file, BOOKMARK.PDF which
   contains links to the individual chapter files.

3. The scans were performed at 300 dots per inch, 1 bit per pixel, and .GIF
   compressed which is a lossless compression method.

4. With one or two exceptions, every page was scanned with a width of 5.99
   inches and height of 10 inches giving a scan size of 1797 X 3000 pixels.

5. You will note that the page size as reported by Acrobat Reader is
   extraordinarily large (25 X 42in.).  This is because it assumes a graphic
   resolution of 72 DPI while the scans are 300DPI and there seems to be no
   way to change this.

6. Thus when viewing, set either "Fit in Window" if your monitor is large or
   "Fit width" if it is smaller.  Viewing at "100% size" is way too large.

7. Accordingly when printing from the Acrobat Reader, PLEASE set it to "Reduce
   oversized pages to paper size" and then set the desired paper size, either
   Letter or A4 and Portrait orientation.

8. Scan and print quality from a laser printer is at least equal to and in
   many cases better than the Xerox copies I used to make available.  Many
   errors have been edited out and Xerox artifacts deleted.  Still some pages
   may not be perfectly straight since most of the originals were crooked and
   alignment on the scanner was by eye (and very tedious).  I guess unbinding
   an original book would have been better but they're too valuable - even to
   the author!


                                  COPYRIGHT

And now a word about copyright.  Per standard author's contract with the
publisher, all publication and distribution rights reverted to me after the
book went out-of-print for 3 years.  While much of the material is dated and
even quaint by today's standards, much continues to be a valuable resource for
teaching and learning about music and sound synthesis technology.  Thus I'm
not quite ready to throw it all to the winds of the Internet, at least not
willingly.  So I only ask four things of those who acquire these files:

1. Please don't copy and give away or sell this disk or post the files on a
web site or bulletin board or file sharing service.  Likewise, please don't
sell or give away multiple printed copies of the files.

2. However permission is granted to reproduce up to ONE complete chapter for
use in a classroom setting without prior notice or compensation. If, as a
teacher, you wish to make more than that available to your students, please
contact me at HAL_4096 at YAHOO.COM to work something out.

3. When taking advantage of #2 above, please give credit to the author (Hal
Chamberlin) and give the publication date, 1985.

4. Permission is granted to quote or paraphrase reasonable amounts of material
provided that a full bibliographic citation is included.  Below is the proper
format (according to most style manuals) for such a citation:

 Chamberlin, Hal.  _Musical Applications of Microprocessors_, Second Edition.
 Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey: Hayden Book Company, 1985.

The full publisher's copyright page including Library of Congress listing is
in the file Front.pdf.


Additional copies of this disk can be obtained from myself at the address
below for $15.00 each in singles which includes first-class shipping to
anywhere in the US.  Payment by check or money-order in US dollars.  Contact
me by e-mail if you wish to use Pay Pal instead of a check or if you wish
to purchase multiple copies.

   Hal Chamberlin
   212 Weston Street
   P.O. Box 540031
   Waltham, MA 02454
   USA

   hal_4096 at yahoo.com




        A BRIEF HISTORY OF "MUSICAL APPLICATIONS OF MICROPROCESSORS"

The first edition was written over a 3-year period from 1977 and finally was
published in 1980 to excellent reviews by the computer and electronic music
press (such as it was in 1980).  The second edition took a bit over 1 year to
prepare and mainly involved updating Chapter 5 (Microprocessors), Chapter 9
(to add coverage of MIDI), and adding Section 4 (Product Applications and the
Future).  The second edition was published in 1985, 100 pages larger and $10
more expensive, again to favorable reviews.

Since then the field of computer music has grown so much that it would take
thousands of pages to cover it in the same degree of detail. Moreover, the
field is moving faster than a single individual can possibly write let alone
learn about. Thus any future endeavors will either have to narrow the field
considerably (modern PCs are hardly microprocessor systems any more) or focus
on a small part of computer music technology.


                      HOW THE FIRST EDITION WAS WRITTEN

In 1972, long before the personal computer revolution, I was half owner of a
4-man startup corporation exploring applications of the just released 8008
microprocessor. For income we did contract engineering but for a long-term
product development We settled on the then novel idea of a text editing
machine with 1) a CRT display that would show an entire page at once, 2) show
that page in 1:1 scale exactly as it would be printed, and 3) would use a
floppy disk to hold the text data and software.

The first prototype was completed in a year and a half and actually worked
quite well although the display flickered badly from its 30Hz refresh rate and
TV picture tube phosphor. Memory was a whopping 8K bytes (as 64 1K DRAM chips)
for software and display storage and the 128KB floppy could hold 32 pages, one
per track. Rejustifying a page took about 5 seconds which was fun to watch as
text rearranged itself on the screen in real time.

This proof-of-concept, which as far as I know predated even Xerox's often
cited "first WYSIWYG word processor", landed us a contract with Hendrix
Electronics, a manufacturer of text editing computers for newspapers, to
develop a 4-terminal system using an IMP-16 processor from National
Semiconductor. This ultimately became A.B. Dick's successful "Magna-SL" office
system and I had the good fortune of being able to retain one of the
prototypes in my home in 1976; something unheard of at the time.

For me this was truly a case of the tool making the craftsman.  Throughout the
development I used the prototype nights and weekends to first write my
Master's thesis then later to found a hobby computing newsletter, write
magazine articles, and finally start on my magnum opus in early 1977. I am
quite sure that had this tool not been available, I would have never gotten
into writing.

The text for the first edition was written over a 3-year period on nights and
weekends.  Productivity was about 1 page per day of finished, edited text
which was submitted to the publisher on over 600 double-spaced pages from the
"daisy-wheel" printer the system used.  Floppy disk capacity had grown to 360K
on single-sided 8-inch disks and it took six of them to hold the text. Block
diagrams and other representative drawings were hand-sketched on grid paper
then given to the publisher to be put into final form by a draftsman.

The many graphs, waveforms, spectral plots and such however were drawn by a
different computer - a KIM-1 6502 microprocessor trainer kit. This was
interfaced to a daisy-wheel printer which had the interesting capability of
being able to position the printhead randomly in 1/120" steps and move the
paper randomly in 1/96" steps. A custom BASIC program was written for each
drawing and by positioning the head and paper then printing the "period"
character, accurate plots up to 17x22" in size could be made. The interpretive
BASIC programs were very slow however and took from a couple of hours to
compute and draw a basic waveform to a couple of days to compute and make a
detailed spectral plot. The publisher then took those drawings, added labels,
and reduced them photographically by as much as 10 times to produce the
high-quality plots in the book. All told, about a year was spent on the
drawings.

Then there were galley sheets and proofreading (all of the text was rekeyed
ino typesetting machines from the printed pages I supplied), then finally
production, distribution, and sales.  Over 10,000 copies were ultimately sold
which was considered good for a technical book that was not written to be a
textbook.

Text and drawings for the second edition, which began 4 years later in 1984,
were done basically the same way with the same, now ageing, equipment. That
took only one year and the result is what you see here.


                         WHY CD-ROM DISTRIBUTION?

Ever since this book went out-of-print and available inventories were sold
out I have made Xerox copies available to all who wanted them at the book's
original retail price of $39.95 (plus shipping). I guess with inflation it
should have been more but then the printing quality wasn't as good either.

Anyway, of that $40, $25 went for copying costs (412 double-sided pages plus
punching) and a 3-ring binder big enough to hold them. Then there was shipping
for 9 pounds (4 kilograms) which is really substantial when sending out of the
country. Naturally it was a hassle buying the binders, getting the copying
done, inserting the pages, and packing the boxes. I did several batches of 10
each over the years and despite the complications, was glad to do so.

As mentioned in the last chapter, the declining cost of digital storage is the
single most influential trend in computer technology since it began in the
1950s.  Its many times stronger and more important than even the famous
"Moore's Law" of chip technology.  In the ten years time since "Hal's Copy
Shop" started, electronic distribution of the book has gone from "impractical"
to "How else?".

Even when stored in the most inefficient format possible (scanned images), it
all fits onto 1/6 of a 30 cent disk that I can make while washing dishes! If I
like, it can be put onto a business-card sized disk to hand out at dinner
parties. And if that's too big, it would even fit on a single SmartMedia or
other flash card although not quite as cheaply.

Some more mind-boggling facts.  "Musical Applications" is 810 pages which is
about 3 times the size of an "average" book. That means that scans of about 20
average books would fit onto a 30 cent CD/R at a cost of about 1.5 cent each.
A DVD disk holds about 7X more for 3X the cost and there's talk of blue laser
DVDs that hold 4 times again as much (560 books) on the horizon. In other
words, a library that would have taken up all of the wall space of a decent
sized study can now fit on a handful of disks that physically cost no more
than a good meal at McDonalds. And with high-speed Internet access and on-line
storage, there's not even much point in keeping those disks around in one's
home. Then there's recorded music. We do indeed live in interesting times!