Opcode Systems

» see opcode.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Dave Oppenheim was a Stanford graduate and a musician, and in 1985 he started Opcode Systems in Palo Alto to sell MIDI sequencing for the Macintosh. The first product went out in 1986 as MIDIMAC, a sequencer and a hardware interface, and Apple made him change the name. Chris Halaby came in as president in 1987 and ran the business side while Oppenheim ran engineering.

Vision arrived in 1989 with graphical editing and real-time recording, and it became the sequencer film composers used. Studio Vision followed in 1990 and was the first commercial product anywhere that recorded digital audio and MIDI on one unified timeline, so a vocal take and a synth part finally lived in the same window with the same ruler underneath them. Galaxy handled patch storage for a room full of synthesizers. OMS, the Opcode MIDI System, was the piece nobody bought on purpose and everybody depended on.

Gibson Guitar Corporation bought the company in 1998. Within a year development had stopped on everything, with no migration path offered and no source released. Several of the engineers went to Apple, where the MIDI and audio layers of Mac OS X were being written, which is roughly where the ideas ended up anyway.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the layer under everything ~

OMS shipped in 1990 and did something narrow. You drew your studio once, every cable and every device and which port it hung off, and then every MIDI application on the machine read that description instead of asking you again. Other companies' sequencers used it too. It was infrastructure sold as a free download by a company that made its money elsewhere.

When Opcode stopped, OMS stopped. It limped through the last versions of Mac OS 9 on other people's goodwill and then had nowhere to go, because Mac OS X was a different operating system underneath. Apple's Core MIDI eventually did the same job at the system level, which is the good ending, but there were a couple of years in between where a working studio could not move forward and could not stay where it was.

~ the max footnote ~

Opcode licensed Max in 1989 and shipped it commercially in 1990, a visual programming environment for building your own MIDI instruments rather than playing somebody else's. David Zicarelli developed it there. Active work slowed in the mid-1990s, and in 1997 Zicarelli acquired the publishing rights and started Cycling '74 to keep it going.

Max is still shipping in 2026. It is the only Opcode product that is, and it left the company a year before Gibson bought it.

~ trackers instead ~

Everything above happened on Macintoshes, in professional studios, at prices a studio could justify and a teenager could not. That world was more or less invisible from where I was sitting in the late 1990s. Turkey ran on PCs, the Mac was a rumor with a price tag, and anyone making music at home was doing it in FastTracker 2 or Impulse Tracker with a Sound Blaster and a numeric keypad.

The tracker scene and the sequencer scene were solving the same problem with different budgets, and only one of them left an install base worth acquiring. Opcode got acquired and shut. The trackers got abandoned and are still being used.

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