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Comment by rytis | Hacker News Reader

> We tolerate MIDI, but it's really pretty terrible. It's ubiquitous, but it's just barely good enough to have avoided being replaced.

OK, what I'm going to say is not constructive, but, boy, how I hate this type of comments. Where were you 40 years ago? Why did you not prevent it from being terrible? What did you do to replace it with something better?

Yes, it may be "suboptimal" by the 2019 "standards", but back then, I'm pretty sure, people put a lot of thought in to it and tried to make it as good as possible. Just because it looks childish on the current hardware does not make it "pretty terrible".

EDIT: It's almost like complaining that 555 is absolute rubbish comparing to 8266 that can do sooo much more, and why just did they not come up with something better back then.

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>OK, what I'm going to say is not constructive, but, boy, how I hate this type of comments. Where were you 40 years ago? Why did you not prevent it from being terrible? What did you do to replace it with something better?

I'm not saying that they should have come up with something better. MIDI was an incredible breakthrough in 1983, but it was designed in 1983. That's a very, very long time in technology. We've known about and dealt with the shortcomings of MIDI for decades, but it's difficult to replace a deeply-entrenched standard. MIDI has been pushed as far as possible without breaking backwards-compatibility, but it is now long overdue for the industry to move in unison and create something fit for the 21st century.

Imagine if you dealt with lots of devices on a daily basis that had a 33kbaud serial interface. Would that kind of annoy you? Would you say "this archaic serial format is just great!". No, you'd be kind of cheesed off that you were stuck with it.

MIDI 2.0 looks great. It's a really big deal for the electronic music industry. You can only usefully say why it's a big deal if you acknowledge all of the crummy, annoying parts of MIDI 1.0.

> boy, how I hate this type of comments

And I'm not a fan of this kind, either.

Yes, it might be unfair to poke holes in a standard from the 80s from a 2019 perspective, but it was GP's assertion that the MIDI standard was unsuitable to last as long as it did without an update. _That_ is what is being criticised as pretty terrible, and that's fairly clear from what GP wrote.

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