A Date? (really, tuning stuff!)

Greetings all,
I am finishing a long canvas of a timeline of intonation's changes and
influences for the last 2,500 years. I have a computer icon to place here at
the end, and would like to know what this august group would consider an
appropriate date for the electronic computer's entry into the musical world.
Mersenne's ratios and Cristofori's action are easy to pinpoint, and I am
not going into the detail that would allow the Theremin or Ondes-Martenot,
but for the computer' first significant entry, I need that easy, full
consensus, no debate date . Thoughts?
And thanks,
Ed Foote
(Gearing up to talk to a national convention of piano technians in July!!)

On Sun, 20 Jun 1999 A440A@aol.com wrote:

> Greetings all,
> I am finishing a long canvas of a timeline of intonation's changes and
> influences for the last 2,500 years. I have a computer icon to place here at
> the end, and would like to know what this august group would consider an
> appropriate date for the electronic computer's entry into the musical world.
> Mersenne's ratios and Cristofori's action are easy to pinpoint, and I am
> not going into the detail that would allow the Theremin or Ondes-Martenot,
> but for the computer' first significant entry, I need that easy, full
> consensus, no debate date . Thoughts?

This may be splitting hairs here, but the theremin really should be
counted as distinct from the computer - it's an electronic device, but an
analog one, digital technology really has an impact with synthetic timbre,
but by that measure it might be a bit premature to start talking about
computers in intonation yet, since synthetic timbres haven't really been
used extensively.

-Bram