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Earlier attempts to achieve the desired interactivity with standard midi equipment driven by pitch-followers on acoustic instruments failed miserably. Even when lots of signal changes were send by Atari ST computers, using STEIM's Deviator midi processing software. The limited access to the internal workings of these commercial available processors more or less forced one to look for other solutions.
Attention was given both to hardware and software solutions. The hardware options consisted of a.o. the ISPW, the Kyma/Capybara, the MARS Workstation and the Micro-Control Audiac. The software options were centered around the increasing number crunching capacities of the PPC processor which were found in the PowerMacs and contained SuperCollider, Max/MSP and Csound PPC.
For the hardware option it was clear that if one wanted a true realtime system capable of at least 300 MFLOPS (similar to a slightly well developed ISPW) one needed to invest at least 50.000 US dollars in quickly becoming obsolete equipment (needing permament material upgrades for at least a quarter of that price).
The software solution looked much more promising in this regard. Max/MSP proved to be extremely fragile, Csound was very good for non realtime synthesis and SuperCollider very reliable for concerts. Csound has grown since that period and Max/MSP has gotten better, although the sound quality is still not up the standard of SuperCollider.
To the advantage of Csound and Max/MSP was that one can write one's own application in C and and use it within Csound and Max/MSP. Something SuperCollider 1 and 2 lacked. Considering the current development of SuperCollider3, these shortcomings seem to be addressed in a most appropriate manner.