As part of its 50th Anniversary celebration, Eventide introduced its Flashback legacy product profile series to highlight groundbreaking Eventide products that pioneered unprecedented ways to bend, distort and manipulate sound. The latest in the series – Flashback #10 – Thinking Outside the Black Box – features a product representative of Eventide’s audio technology leadership beyond audio processing tools: the first known piece of instrumentation that was incorporated inside a general-purpose computer – the Eventide THS224 spectrum analyzer for the Commodore PET computer.
Eventide had considered developing a spectrum analyzer in the 1970s, though the task was daunting for a company of its size. “When we got our first PET and saw how much of the spectrum analyzer was already there, we heard the call of the unused space,” Eventide co-founder and chairman Richard Factor recounts in Flashback #10. Having already applied its prowess in digital memory to developing third-party memory expansion cards for Commodore PET – the first true “personal computer” – and as the analog interface and filter set were simple designs for Eventide, the non-trivial challenges remaining were largely software-based (given the technology of the day, more time may have been spent on the fascinating manual than on product development).
Flashback #10 and the rest of the series provide readers a true historical perspective on the company and the technology that fostered audio’s significant advances over the last five decades. The Eventide 50th Flashback episodes can be found at the following links:
Flashback #1: The PS101 Instant Phaser
Flashback #2.1: The DDL 1745 Delay
Flashback #2.2: The DDL 1745A Delay
Flashback #2.3: The DDL 1745M Delay
Flashback #3: The Omnipressor®
Flashback #4.1: The H910 Harmonizer®
Flashback #4.2: H910 Harmonizer® — The Product
Flashback #4.3: H910 Harmonizer® —"Minds Blown"
Flashback #5: FL 201 Instant Flanger
Flashback #6: HM80 – The Baby Harmonizer®
Flashback #7.1: The H949 Harmonizer®
Flashback #7.2: H949 Harmonizer® — The New One
Flashback #7.3: H949 Harmonizer® — Bending, Stretching, and Twisting Time
Flashback #8: H969 Harmonizer®
Flashback #9.1: Broadcast
Flashback #9.2: Dump & Go – The Profanity Delay
Flashback #10: Thinking Outside the Black Box
