Tracker music
Music software where the song is written as a grid of notes scrolling from top to bottom, with samples instead of synth chips.
Karsten Obarski's Ultimate Soundtracker for the Amiga in 1987 set the form: four channels as columns, rows ticking past in time, and short recorded sounds played back at different pitches. The MOD format stored both the patterns and the samples in one file, which turned a whole song into a few tens of kilobytes that could be sent over a modem.
The successors ProTracker, FastTracker II and Impulse Tracker added channels and effects and became standard tools in the demoscene and for shareware game music. The interface survives: modern tools such as Renoise are built on the same vertical grid, and a generation of producers learned to compose without reading notation.