I remember Cadenza Clyn. I never use it but I knew about it. I started with MIDI Lab. Up graded to Professional 8 and up graded that to Pro Audio 9. I never looked back after that. 
 
I had a version of Cakewalk for Windows but it looked very intimidating to me. I could never figure it out. It came bundled with my Sound Blaster. LOL

John
 
I had a version of Cakewalk for Windows but it looked very intimidating to me. I could never figure it out. It came bundled with my Sound Blaster. LOL

That's where I got my first copy of Cakewalk, and Cubase bundled with something else. When Cadenza went out of business I liked Cakewalk a lot more than Cubase - the rest is history

It is amazing that it's been 30 years since it was introduced.

FCCfirstclass
I was running an Atari with my DX 7 and a few other pieces.  When we bought our first big computer, a brand new IBM AT in January of 1985, the first thing I did was to expand the memory from 512Kb to 2Mb with an Intel Above Board and then added a MIDI card (don't remember the name, but you had to set the switches to use a free IRQ) to run MIDI with the AT.  Then SoundBlaster came out with a sound card that used a MIDI / Serial port. 
 
And I was 30 then.  Ah memories.
 
Happy 30th birthday, MIDI.  Yes it is mind stretching to think that spec is still around when 99% of the old specs are long gone.

can dig...I was running an Altair with my DX7 running software that a buddy of mine from MIT wrote. 

Andrew Rossa [Cakewalk]
...30 years since it was introduced.

 
MIDI existed before 1983 in different forms.  I remember hearing about it in 1981.  But back then the different manufacturers each had their own proprietary version of it, so you couldn't connect two devices together unless you restricted yourself to a single brand.

OK, I think that the six-track Commodore 64 sequencer I had was Dr T's and it had a proprietary hardware interface that plugged into the cartridge slot for MIDI In/Out and drum machine sync.  If I remember right, you recorded patterns and then pressed computer keys to trigger patterns and chain them together.
 
I cannot find a screen image on the C64 to know for sure, but this sounds right.
 
I used the portable SX-64 computer and actually made a lot of records this way.  I would show up at the studio with my drum machine, keyboard, and portable computer.  I would plug in and we would record drums, bass, and keyboards that I had already programmed, and then we would start overdubbing real guitars and other parts.
 
The drum patterns were stored in the drum machine and saved to cassette tape so you had to have a floppy disk for the computer sequence and a cassette tape for the drums.  Luckily, the Linn LM-1 Drum Computer and the Linn Drum had enough memory for a whole album or more without resorting to the tape.

bitflipper
 
When I got home I bought a Yamaha TG-33.

I still have my TG33 and it works great. I still have my Roland U-20 keyboard as well.