Dave Smith

Smith founded Sequential Circuits in California in 1974 and broke through with the Prophet-5 in 1978. In 1981 he and Chet Wood presented a proposal at an AES convention for a common digital interface between synths from different makers, the Universal Synthesizer Interface. After negotiations with Roland, Yamaha and others it became MIDI, released in 1983 and still in use. Smith and Roland's Ikutaro Kakehashi shared a Technical Grammy for it in 2013.

Sequential went bankrupt in 1987 and the name ended up with Yamaha. Smith went on to, among other things, software synthesis, and founded Dave Smith Instruments in 2002; in 2015 Yamaha handed the Sequential trademark back, an unusual gesture in an industry that usually clings to its names. He died in 2022.