Hacker News Reader

In fairness, Roland founded the MMA and wrote most of the MIDI spec. The odds are fairly good that Roland did invent SysEx.

I thought Dave Smith was primarily responsible? Just to put another notch in Silicon Valley’s belt, I guess.

Dave Smith was the first to get on board with the project and made substantial contributions to the design of MIDI, but it was Ikutaro Kakehashi who started the whole endeavour. MIDI was heavily influenced by DCB, a proprietary interface developed by Roland in 1981.

Yep, when I did a little work for the Midifighter[1] controller, I used sysex to send configuration (but not firmware updates) to the device, to be stored in EEPROM. It was a nice and seamless mechanism.

[1] https://www.midifighter.com/ I made the first version of the configuration tool.

I also updated my TC Electronic Nova System via MIDI as well. It is a common feature across other MIDI devices.