Synthesizing calculator

[Joseph_21sv]

In the 1980s, Casio produced two models of eight digit square wave based monophonic synthesizing calculators with 100-step sequencers and 19 selectable tempi: the VL-1/10 and the VL-80. Of these two, the VL-1/10 is the fuller featured synthesizer with five preset instrument sounds, ten preset percussion patterns and an envelope with waveform, attack, decay, sustain level and time, release time, vibrato and tremolo programmable by entering an eight digit number into the calculator's memory. Although this synthesizer was popular at its time and stays popular today, nobody really developed further on the concept of a synthesizing calculator either on the synthesizer or calculator side of the equation. How could so many companies, including HP, have failed to see the potential business in a synthesizing calculator with MIDI or a synthesizing scientific or financial calculator? What might it have looked like for some company to make a more advanced synthesizing calculator?

[Katie Wasserman]

I think that the VL-1 was more of a toy keyboard that allowed for simple recording and ADSR (attach, decay sustain, release) sound customization. It was not polyphonic and it sounded pretty terrible. The calculator was just a fun add-on; there was no integration between the calculator functions and the music functions other than using the single memory register for the custom ADSR value.

Had the calculator been programmable with the ability to write to the 100 step melody memory, control the volume and rate of playback, well, that would have been quite a nice toy. There was no reason that they couldn't have created such a thing with the technology that they had already in the machine.

I still have my VL-1 (packed away) and have had the manual on my website for years. Most months it's the most popular download so there does indeed seem to be a lot of interest in it.

Maybe HP should consider such a device for their next calculator project after the Prime.

[Joseph_21sv]

(05-02-2016 01:13 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  I think that the VL-1 was more of a toy keyboard that allowed for simple recording and ADSR (attach, decay sustain, release) sound customization. It was not polyphonic and it sounded pretty terrible. The calculator was just a fun add-on; there was no integration between the calculator functions and the music functions other than using the single memory register for the custom ADSR value.

Had the calculator been programmable with the ability to write to the 100 step melody memory, control the volume and rate of playback, well, that would have been quite a nice toy. There was no reason that they couldn't have created such a thing with the technology that they had already in the machine.

I still have my VL-1 (packed away) and have had the manual on my website for years. Most months it's the most popular download so there does indeed seem to be a lot of interest in it.

Maybe HP should consider such a device for their next calculator project after the Prime.

The VL-1 had actually already been used seriously several times in the 1980s in spite of being so limited. In fact, that is why it became so notable in the history of electronic music. And yet nobody at the time seemed to have believed there could be business in developing the idea of the device into something more serious on the calculator side or the synthesizer, in particular TI and Casio themselves, who were simultaneously actively making calculators and sound synthesis chips at the time (Casio still is although the advanced models in their current line of calculators are notoriously not very well functionally integrated), and Sharp (now soon to be taken over), Canon and HP, who were exclusively making calculators at the time might have at least considered seeking to license a preexisting sound chip design if they were not to embark on developing one from scratch (Sharp eventually did the latter by way of customizing the Z80 CPU for Nintendo to use in their Game Boy line [now discontinued], but they never used it in anything of their own or licensed it to be used in anything else of a second party's). All five also already had global reach at the time of the VL-1 and so were credibly positioned to establish business in a device which would be a functional upgrade of it. And more importantly that device was very probably going to sell decently enough if just any one of them would have manufactured it. So why did none of them ultimately go forward on developing the hardware for it? Were they just not too confident it could be decently big business?