Origins

01Feb08

Origins

Steinberg’s Cubase (at first briefly known as ‘Cubit’) started life on the Atari ST in 1989, as the successor Sequencer to Steinberg’s professional sequencer “Pro 24″ – it was a complete software re-write. Cubase’s most obvious benefit over Pro 24 was its vastly superior arrange page — in fact, Cubase’s arrange page is now widely regarded as the first sequencer to ‘get it right’, and its paradigm was later wisely incorporated into virtually all the major sequencers (for example, Logic).

However, as the Atari market slowly diminished, Cubase was ported to the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms and subsequent versions introduced features for recording raw audio (Circa late 1992). This porting re-invigorated the Mac sequencer developers, and as time passed, they began to gradually catch-up with their European challengers.

The original Cubase used its own operating system called MROS (MIDI Real-time Operating System) which ran on top of the computer’s own operating system. MROS did not initially work well on Windows 3.0, which was not intended for real-time applications. However, modern operating systems are designed to support multimedia applications, so modern versions of Cubase no longer use MROS.

The release of Cubase in 1993 on the Atari Falcon was a breakthrough in DSP software technology as realtime manipulation of audio was possible without the assistance of additional processor cards, as was the case with the more costly Pro Tools and other similar systems.

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