Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Brand New Fairlight CMI T-Shirts
By James Grahame
The Fairlight Computer Music Instrument was the first digital sampling instrument, capable of recording snippets of real sound and playing them back at different speeds. For better or worse, it profoundly shaped pop music in the 1980s.
Fairlights are still expensive as collector's items, but rabid fans can own a t-shirt with the original logo for under $20. The new shirt was created by Joe, a Fairlight mailing list contributor. He explains:
"I had been looking for a t-shirt with the old (Series I/II(x) era)
Fairlight logo for a while, but couldn't find any. I found shirts with
Roland, PPG, etc. logos, but no Fairlight. So, I made my own!
When I replaced the CRT in my IIx monitor, I put the logo part of the
front piece of the enclosure on a scanner and scanned it. I loaded that
into Photoshop and cleaned it up, then used Illustrator to trace it. I
sent the resulting .eps file to Spreadshirt. For the printing technology used on these shirts, they only accept
vector art with a maximum of 3 colors. That was perfect for this logo.
The stylized "F" is cyan, and the text/frame is either black or white,
depending on which shirt you pick.
Note that I have the commissions for all of these set to $0. I'm not
making any money on them. I wanted a couple of shirts for myself, then
thought that maybe others would like them, too."
Here's a photo of Fairlight co-founder Peter Vogel and his daughter wearing some original Fairlight schwag.
