Decillionix

~ the obituary ~

Decillionix closed about eleven years before I first dialed into anything. Every fact on this page comes out of a scanned music magazine or an emulator source file, with a tag-covered Wikipedia stub in between. That is thin provenance even for a company this small, and the thinness is itself the story: cheap hardware gets reviewed once and then disappears, because the trade press follows the expensive machines.

The expensive machines, in 1983, were the ones that could sample. Decillionix, out of Sunnyvale, sold a different answer. Two cards went into the expansion slots of an Apple II, one a monophonic 8-bit audio input and the other a monophonic 8-bit output, and a program called DX-1 Effects II drove the pair of them. Popular Computing described it in 1983 as a sound-processing system that let you save, process, modify and play sounds entered from a microphone. A 1984 advertisement put the pitch plainly, claiming the DX-1 did much of what the high-priced sampling machines did at a small fraction of the cost.

Dan Retzinger ran the company and did the selling. He told a trade publication he saw a market among musicians and that the DX-1 "does have some studio uses", claiming it had been used to process voices for a radio advertisement. In 1984 the two cards became one card. After that the company moved steadily toward MIDI, and for three more years it kept shipping things.

~ the case file ~

~ two cards and a microphone ~

Read the product list in order and you can watch a small company work out what its own hardware was for. Splash arrived in 1984, an audio visualization program. Echo II in 1985 did effects, and P-Drum the same year sequenced percussion. Synthestra in 1986 was a hierarchical MIDI sequencer. The Box, also 1986, was a standalone MIDI effects unit and the only thing they ever made that did not need an Apple II under it.

Most of that software is one person's work. David Van Brink wrote Splash in 1984 and P-Drum in 1985, and Synthestra the year after that. He has described the sequel to that story himself: the Apple II went away, so he rewrote Synthestra under Mac OS in the nineties, and then that version of the Mac went away too.

~ the greengate problem ~

The June 1985 issue of Electronics & Music Maker ran a column called Rumblings, and its Decillionix paragraph opens by saying the DX-1 "has been more than a little over-shadowed by its cheaper and polyphonic brother, the Greengate DS3". Cheaper and polyphonic is a hard pair to beat with monophonic and dearer. The same column records Retzinger still beavering away at new software regardless: MIDI Madness at $99, which let any MIDI keyboard drive the DX-1, and The Interpolator at the same price.

MIDI Madness needed an Apple II MIDI card to work, so Decillionix sold one of those too, built to talk to the other MIDI cards on the market including Passport's. The column notes approvingly that Passport wanted $195 for its own. Selling a cheaper version of the accessory your own product depends on is a narrow place to stand, and that is where the company stood for its whole life.

~ 128 lines of c++ ~

Wikipedia says Decillionix ceased operations in 1987. An editor flagged that sentence as unsourced in August 2020 and nobody has fixed it since. There is no surviving announcement and no trade notice of a closure anybody has scanned. The last two products are dated 1986, so 1987 is the most reasonable guess available and this grave files it as a guess. What is certain is where the hardware ended up. Somebody wrote it into MAME as a2dx1.cpp, a 128-line BSD-licensed file in the Apple II bus directory, headed "Implementation of the Decillionix DX-1 sampler card". The card outlasted its own company by decades, as a description of itself maintained by strangers.

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