The Fairlight CMI I is marketed in 1979. CMI stands for Computer Musical Instrument. It is based on the architecture of the Fairlight Qasar prototype, and it has 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 drives: double sides, simple density disk (512Kb)
6 octave keyboard, featuring key velocity sensitivity, with 3 sliders and 2 switch buttons assignable 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, created by Peter Vogel, which made the CMI I the first machine using this type of language. It was soon followed by the Synclavier.
Layout on the CMI-25 motherboard
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