/ubergeek mode on/
Anyone here remember the Fairlight Excalibur from days of yore?
It's an obvious reference to the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instruments), one of the first polyphonic sampling synthesizers. Fairlight was known for selling handmade electronics and high-quality hardware for truly stupid prices. In the early 80s, a new CMI would cost you over $25k, enough to buy a nicely equipped BMW. As such, they were bought only by elite musicians - Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel both owned them - until their competitors caught up and they went bust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairlight_CMIThe Excalibur wasn't the only deck to share something with synthesizers. Aside from the obvious similarity in shape to an early monophonic synth, cyberdecks also followed a similar naming pattern - a noun then a number, such as the Prophet-7 or Juno-106.
Especially interesting, though, is exactly what happened to Fairlight. In order to clear off their unsold merchandise, they repurposed it as word processing machines. Remove the DSP functionality from a CMI and it's just another desktop PC....but what if someone were to make use of it - say, for processing the output of a set of 'trodes?
/ubergeek off/