MP3 decoding circa 1980

I was explaining to my Dad the other day the concept of data CDs with MP3s on. "So why didn't they do CDs like that to start with?", he asked.

Well, I said, at the time the audio CD was first announced, the amount of computing power needed to decode MP3 in real-time would fill a room.

But that set me thinking: what sort of computer could you have played an MP3 on in 1980, if MP3 had been invented that long ago? Say MP3 decoding needs about 40 MIPS. A Cray-1 could do it, but no Vax of the time could. Were there mainframes that could do it? What was the first computer powerful enough to decode an MP3? When was the first time the world's total computing power exceeded 40 MIPS?

Peter

I don't know, although you should also remember that hard disks were a bit smaller then too.

In 1988, a 20MB HD was considered quite large in the context of a small network server.

When was the first sound card?

I remember the first SoundBlaster. Let's see. That would be around... 1986 or 1987?

Don't forget the AdLib. I believe that was the first consumer-oriented sound device. And I believe that was around 1985 or so?

Edit: I found a timeline, and the AdLib came out in 1987, so the SB must have been a year or two later. It also reminded me that the LdLib was just FM synthesis, so it wouldn't have been able to play mp3s.

Right, I remember the AdLib and the SoundBlaster boards coming out very close to the same time, and the SoundBlaster being more widely accepted because it would play digital audio instead of just FM synthesus. Of course, the first ones were low sampling rate, mono only, did not contain an onboard mixer, etc. But they were cool for their time!

And, then, not too long after that, the SoundBlaster16, which brought us up to stereo and reasonable sample rates. I only bring this up because I'm still using an orginal SB16 in my main computer to this day. ISA, IRQ and IO Port jumpers and all.

Yup, Doom deathmatch in stereo was the ultimate. Suddenly the game sounds became critical to playing well, and we all discovered how to hook up headphones to our PCs. Ah, those were the days.

Ha! I remember how shocked I was that when an Imp was about to kill me from the right, I could hear him from the right!

And no one will ever forget that first time we heard the thump-thump-thump of the cyberdemon outside the door...

There were other alternative technologies at that time. There were some studio digital recorders that were based on differential pulse code modulation that based the next signal on the prior signal instead of discrete samples (with a reference signal of 0). If I remember correctly, an audio signal could be captured with 1/4 of the bit rate as CDs. The company was dbx which were known for compression schemes on analog audio tape.

Don't forget the Amiga. It ran circles around Soundblaster in its day. :-) Plus the Amiga was the birthplace of all that mod music still hanging around on the web even now.

Calvin

Right, right. The Amiga was truly multimedia long before that term could ever be applied to the PC.

or, my personal favorite, the next cube, released in 1989. it had an integrated motorola 56001 DSP, fully programmable. it had no problem capturing (and mixing!) cd/dat quality sound.

ahh, now that was a computer.

--dan.

Yeah, we had one on display in Hugo's shop (although it was a museum piece by then - 1993). Nice magnesium case

Rob

The Amiga predated the Next. :-) With multple dedicated graphics coprocessors and a dedicated audio processor back in the day when good quality sound was all about getting a 1-bit piezo buzzer speaker to sound acceptable.

Calvin

I bought a game years ago (I think it was Leather Goddesses of Phobos II -- yup, just found the box) that came with a ``Lifesize Sound Enhancer'', which was a parallel-port dongle that had a single RCA output on the end. Very weird. Weirder still is that the game supported AdLib and SoundBlaster (and Roland -- very high-end for the time) and they were quite common by that point. I still have it lying around, too.

I used to have a Commadore 64.