It was back in 1984. I'd been making music with an arp odyssey and a 
bunch of badly hand-built analog modules for 8 years, and had 
recently acquired a DX-7, fascinated by the textures FM could produce 
when properly mangled, and by the notion of having a synth that could 
actually remember its settings.

I went to a demo  of Sequential Circuits Sequencer for the C64  at a 
local music store. I was appalled. The thing was modeled after a tape 
recorder, and couldn't even edit its own data! There was no interest 
in making an editor for the DX-7, a formidable (and expensive) beast 
to edit without a computer.

It quickly became obvious to me that it was going to be a long time 
before the market produced software that a texturally oriented 
improvisor with no music training or keyboard chops could make use 
of. Well, I was used to building my own gear, and had long ago cut 
back on my day job to have more studio time, so I decided to write my 
own software. I realized also that software, unlike hardware, did not 
suffer from cold solder joints, and that once an original was made, 
copies could be sold.

I was probably additionally motivated by having (on the previous 
night)  escaped with a few scratches from a potentially serious 
motorcycle accident, having that morning had a dream in which I was 
injured in such an accident and couldn't play music for a few months. 
While not of a superstitious nature, it was hard not to take this 
sequence (pun intended) of events as some kind of a message.

So I bought a C64 and started coding in every spare minute. After 
about 3 months, I had a DX-7 patch editor, and the very first version 
of KCS came out in, I think it was, October of 1984. Later on came 
ports to the Apple II, C128, and Atari, with improvements and new 
weird wrinkles added at every step. Alas, I burned out on the 
business side, lost focus, and we never got KCS onto a more lasting 
platform in any acceptable form.
-- 

Visit "Before the Fall -- Images of the World Trade Center" at 
http://www.foryourhead.com

"There were so many things there that are not anywhere else in the 
world. There were millions of people, the strange reflective bars of 
the buildings and the shiny and shimmering towers that seemed like a 
fairy tale"   -- David-Michael Cook

            Emile Tobenfeld, Ph. D.
Video Producer                  Image Processing Specialist
Video for your HEAD!                  Boris FX
http://www.foryourhead.com            http://www.borisfx.com