Although the word was in the air, ICS/Turtle Beach I believe did a great disservice to the population through the unnecessary use of mysterious jargon. Marketeers are allowed that, but in this case the choice was technically wrong and set in motion a persistent misunderstanding.

They chose VS to mean Virtual Synthesizer (not Vector Synthesis); an appellation which has now achieved the status of permanent error. In common usage virtual means “sort of.” Like, virtual reality is ‘sort of’ reality. So, a virtual synthesizer is supposedly ‘sort of’ a real hardware synthesizer. This is obviously stupid, since the sounds created are synthetic either way.

In fact the correct usage of virtual in the computer context derives from “virtual machine”—meaning that the early computer had an overlay to make each user think that they were virtually using a different computer. It is a single thing appearing differently to each user. Similarly, virtual reality is not a ‘sort of’ reality, but a construct that is rich enough to allow each user a unique viewpoint.

So, a virtual synthesizer is one synthesizer that appears to be many; and that is exactly the description of the contemporary multi-timbral MIDI instrument which is in fact one synthesizer with the now developed MIDI logic to appear as up to 16 channels minimum.

‘Virtual’ should never have been adopted to indicate that a software synthesizer was a lesser being than a hardware one. That was proven over and over again as each release of Satie and Reality thoroughly embarrassed competing hardware.

These products were rushed against a year-end release deadline.

The Monte Carlo card was reviewed as having stereo so poor it should be considered mono.

Audio Advantage Card was the second product to play Satie. Seer had high hopes this 12-bit PCMCIA card would give us the initial market for synthesis on laptops. Apparently the market disagreed; you don’t see many of these little guys around.”);

The paradigm case for Intel native signal processing NSP at Comdex.

Satie was Seer’s name for the system.

SoftNotes was how Intel Marketed it.

Professional announcements presuppose adoption, and by this time Wavefront-VS was the name used by Intel’s first licensee Integrated Circuit Systems, which had acquired Turtle Beach. Of no small coincidence Dave Taylor had attended my first Intel MIDI presentation, quietly guarded the project for Intel’s Strategic Marketing Division, and having left for ICS thus was in a perfect position to negotiate the deal, which included consumer releases via Turtle Beach.

19940901 Intel sends Sj to Pitch Microsoft; Heidi Breslauer.
They did not at all like the idea that our VxD had control over the CPU’s main interrupt.

19940501 Excluside Distribution of “SoftNotes” given to ICS /Turtle Beach
19940503 Henry Velick