Fairlight CMI I
INFORMATION
First model of the Fairlight CMI, marketed in 1979.
CMI stands for Computer Musical Instrument.
It was based on the architecture of the Fairlight Qasar prototype, and it had most of its features:
- Dual 8-bit 1 Mhz Motorola 6800 processors
- 8 channel cards with 16Kb waveform RAM = 8 voices of polyphony
- 64Kb system RAM (QDOS)
- Two 8″ floppy disks: double sides, simple density (512Kb)
- Non-weighted 6 octave keyboard, featuring key velocity sensitivity, with 3 sliders and 2 switch buttons that can be alloted to various parameters (vibrato, volume, sustain… ).
A second keyboard is proposed as an option (without the control buttons) - Monochrome monitor which was used to visualise waveforms and to edit parameters: resolution was 512 x 256 pixels
- Alphanumeric keyboard
- Lightpen
- Additive synthesis with FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)
- 24Khz 8-bit sampling
- Sequencer (page C)
- MCL: Musical Composition Language, which made the Fairlight CMI I the first machine using this type of language. It was soon followed by the Synclavier
The cards are arranged on the CMI-25 motherboard as follows:
| ID | Description | Slot |
|---|---|---|
| CMI-02 | Master card: control of 8 channel cards, ADC sampling, timerfunctions for sequencer and MCL | 1 |
| CMI-01 | Channel card with 16Kb waveform RAM CEM3320 Filter | 3 to 10 |
| Q045 | Graphics card | 9 |
| CMI-07 | Analog interface card (optional): 16 inputs/outputs to control analog synthesizers | 11 |
| Q148 | Lightpen card | 12 |
| Q096 | 64Kb system RAM card | 13 to 15 |
| Q032 | Processor control card | 16 |
| Q026 | Dual 6800 processors | 17 |
| QFC2 | Floppy disk controller | 18 |
| Q025 | 16Kb video graphics RAM | 20 |