Synclavier

The Synclavier was built by Sydney Alonso, Cameron Jones and composer Jon Appleton at Dartmouth College, and sold from the late seventies by their company, New England Digital. The first version did digital FM and additive synthesis under the control of its own minicomputer. The eighties brought sampling, first to RAM and then straight to hard disk, and with it the idea of the "tapeless studio" where an entire production lived inside one machine.

Fully loaded systems cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and went to film studios and stars; Frank Zappa's Jazz from Hell (1986) was recorded almost entirely on one. Personal computers with MIDI and cheap samplers then ate the market from below, and NED folded in 1993. Most of what a Synclavier did, any DAW does today.