Sequential Archeology
Technology moves inexorably forward, but you never know when you’ll need to dig up the past.
Last year I had to resurrect some old Cubase files from the early 1990’s, and this turned out to be a surprisingly interesting challenge. How do you open *.ARR (arrange) and *.SNG (song) files authored with one of the early Macintosh versions of Cubase over 25 years after they were created?
While I still own a Macintosh Plus capable of running the version of Cubase with which these sequences would have been written, I didn’t have the copy-protection device required to run the software. And although the initial versions of Cubase’s modern reincarnation — first baptised as Cubase SX in 2002 — were theoretically able to import files from the past, sadly they weren’t able to open the files in question.
An acquaintance from a certain sequencer developer recommended I run an Atari emulator with one of the cracked versions of Cubase that existed back in the day, which can still be found online. And while I was indeed able to get an illegal Atari version of Cubase from the early ’90s running in Steem, the nature of the crack prohibited the files from being opened in a manner that could be described as useful.
While friends make fun of me for curating what they refer to as a “sequencer museum”, one of my artifacts is a Windows version of Cubase Score 3 from 1996. The included copy-protection device needed to be attached to a parallel port (an interface designed by Centronics, later standerdised with a 25-pin connector by IBM), which was most commonly used for printers in the days before USB.
Not reading the small print, I purchased a USB-to-parallel cable, assuming this would do the job — but it turns out such cables are only useful for connecting legacy printers rather than other peripherals. Reproducing the timing required by the interface is apparently a tricky thing to do via the Universal Serial Bus, so I had to buy a PCIe-based alternative that was capable of providing a fully-functional parallel port.
After using a USB floppy drive to create images of the original installation disks, I used VMWare’s Workstation to create a virtual machine running Windows 3.11 and installed the legitimate copy of Cubase Score, which was able to run with its original copy protection thanks to the aforementioned PCIe card. And best of all, after all this, the files created on the early Mac version of Cubase opened just fine on this early Windows version, enabling Standard MIDI Files to be exported that could be loaded into the sequencers of today.
There are three things I’ve taken away from this experience. Firstly, it’s frankly astonishing the Standard MIDI File is still the most reliable way of exchanging musical data between the past and the present, let alone the future. Secondly, that it’s even possible to run an old version of Cubase in a virtual machine on a modern system with the original copy protection is a testament to the backwards compatibility some companies feel is irrelevant. But thirdly, and perhaps more importantly, why aren’t products from a quarter of a century ago not freely-available today? I have the utmost respect for intellectual property; and, while I’m sure in many cases the technology has simply been lost, where it is possible for companies to provide legacy software so that past work could be more easily preserved and retrieved, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
As a footnote, it’s worth mentioning the work the Computer History Museum undertakes to preserve software from the past. Adobe have donated the source code for the first version of PhotoShop, Microsoft gave permission for the MS-DOS 2.0 and Word 1.1 sources to be published, and even Apple have allowed the code for MacPaint and QuickDraw to be released. This year will also see the Lisa’s operating system join the collection.
