Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546135
20 FA L L 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y of people who used it. Bill Warner, who started Avid, reached out to us, and they became one of our first, if not our first, third-party developer. So that was a brilliant thing that came from Peter—this concept of having a third-party developer program. It was kind of modeled on what Apple did. They had all these third-party developers that made their platform work, so Apple didn't have to develop all these applications." Peter recalls, "Our long-term strategy was to replicate/ enhance the functionality of a recording studio in an integrated computer environment. Analog studios were 'multi-vendor' systems—you might have a Neve console, Lexicon reverb, UREI dynamics processors, API EQ's, etc. We were replacing outboard with algorithms, but we knew we couldn't replicate every 'flavor' of processing, and there were many companies that had spent years perfecting their sound. I thought the best way to provide a wide range of choices was to open the system up. Some computing platforms had started to do this, notably engineering CAD workstations from Sun Micro, HP, etc. That gave me the idea. It was very controversial in the company at the time as third-party developer programs require developing API's, documentation, support, etc. My sales team thought we needed to prioritize features, bug fixes, etc. Fortunately, as CEO I got to override the short-term issues and prioritize the long-term vision. I believe that the rich ecosystem of third-party plugins, apps, hardware add-ons, etc., are perhaps the number one reason for Pro Tools' longevity." Evan continues, "So, we adopted a third-party developer program. We said we've got these hardware products; you can put them into whatever you want, we'll write all "Q-Sheet" sync software. Photo from Music Technology, January, 1988 Digidesign ProControl the drivers for you, we'll work with you, we'll make all these things work. So Avid had their own software that they wanted to write to do the audio part of their video editor, and they OEM'd our products. As our hardware products evolved and we started adding hardware interfaces for the audio I/O, they ended up adopting those and it became an integral part of their whole system." Peter shares, "Bill Warner, the founder and then CEO of Avid, found me. They had pioneered non-linear video editing, but their customers were complaining about their minimal audio capabilities. They first became a third- party developer, but when they decided to include our hardware and software in every Media Composer system the relationship grew." Digidesign seemed to really keep up with advances in computer processing power—developing TDM with real- time processing and expansion abilities up to 16 tracks. Peter shares, "I give Evan a ton of credit for keeping us on the cutting edge of computing technologies. He had experience with both hardware and software, and he was very good at keeping up on the latest developments. We had a great symbiotic partnership—he knew what current technology was capable of, and I was able to matchmake that with the functional product vision. There were multiple recent tech innovations that made Pro Tools possible, from Motorola general purpose DSP processors, to low-cost monolithic 16-bit A/D and D/A convertors, to FPGA ASIC's (they made TDM possible), to updates to NuBus and eventually PCI that allowed DMA, etc., etc. Evan explained these to me as we tried to figure out how to coax the most out of the Mac environment. We were