Creating music with a PC in the 90s was very frustrating. I've used Voyetra DOP back in the day to back up my trusty Roland PMA-5 SYSX data. Recently I've restored all my work and transferred it to MIDI using Sonar. Hope to get back to it some day and turn it into good sounding records.

It's amazing how quickly you adapt to a method of entering notes into a sequencer. Back in the old Nokia flip phone days when you could program your own ringtones, I became a total whizz at entering the notes of any tune into the phone via the numeric keypad. 
 
I had OctaMED in the early 90's. Absolutely loved it. No MIDI, no external gear, just an 8-bit sampling cartridge which I used to sample everything that was worth sampling from my CD collection. I would also sample single guitar notes and intervals up and down the neck at various pitches, and would combine them to make any chord I liked. Entering notes was basically entering numbers with the numeric keypad into a giant vertical list of numbers, and once I got going with that thing I could write any part that came into my head, even complex jazz-fusion lines. It doesn't matter how tedious or fiddly a workflow is, if you're motivated to reach an end result and you put the time in, it becomes second nature. 
 
I can read and write music but these days I much prefer to write in the piano roll. It just makes more sense to me, and you can "see" familiar chord shapes in it just as you can see them on a stave. 
 
Having said that, I think the guitar fretboard will always be the most familiar to me in terms of scales and harmony. I think in shapes! Even when I'm composing in the piano roll, I always keep the fretboard in my mind's eye. 

Resurrecting this thread about an obsolete software, for whatever it may be worth. Also trying to clean out my archive of programs not used for decades, so not to post something about something surpassed and irrelevant.
 
Record Midi Producer still remains one of the most powerful midi drum loop creators available. Such a pity they decided not to evolve the project. The Voyetra bastards are still online selling headphones and tee shirts, but won't let you do the online activation or license transfer if you were alive when they sold it to you. Their excuse for shutting down the online activation server...to protect you from old software and possible data loss. Bastards...
 
Have the damned thing cracked wide open, and runs fine in win 10. Can PM if you want to try it.
 
Latency can be a **** if your soundcard doesn't have a ROM chip. In which case the program is useless. Down side to old stuff.
 
Workaround is to get a return path to a hardware external unit, simple as the keyboard you are inputting data with.
 
In which case latency is cut to near zero and you can hear the loop you are creating in about real time. Haven't yet found something that works so good.
 
John