Unfortunately, our tech support dropped Atari, so I tried early versions of Sibelius on both Mac and PC, and my creative output dropped once again to almost nil. I found that I could create a score in little more time than it would take me to play the individual parts on a keyboard. The developers at Atari placed MIDI functionality VERY high among their priorities, and the necessity of fitting the entire program on a 720k floppy disk (!) meant that there were few unnecessary frills beyond those tools that were most useful to composers. In short, Notator was a composer’s dream. Next, I used C-Lab’s Notator on the Atari platform, and was amazed at how well the program worked. Jim’s untimely death created a large gap in music development for the PC platform, so like many others, I left the Intel-based programs for the more reliable architecture of the Motorola 68000 core. Under Jim’s capable hand the home computer became a useful, if clunky tool, and I still have several compositions in my library that were created on his software.
For the remainder of the decade, I used the late Jim Miller’s Personal Composer on MS-DOS machines. I accomplished far more working with pencil and paper at the kitchen table while my wife taught piano in our tiny apartment.
COMPARE FINALE AND FINALE PRINTMUSIC FULL
The functions were so limited, and the interface so cumbersome, that I composed next to nothing for a full two years. My first experience with computer music was on a Commodore Vic-20 sometime around 1980.