Mmm Fairlight. One of the inventors has just put together an iPad app-alike. A little cheaper than the original, a cool £20k or so back in '79 I think. More than a house. At least the box it came in was big enough to live in.
It used 8" disks, and was based on a machine called the Qasar M8 which booted from tape and had 4K of memory. CMI took the guts and added eight voice cards, each of which sampled at 8-bit with 16K of RAM and 4K of control ROM. Aside from sampling, you could draw waves on the screen with a lightpen and later on a simple sequencer was added, known as Page R.
Despite the expense, several acts used them back in the day - and despite it being a sampler, and therefore supposedly able to sound like anything, it's often pretty distinctive on the records in which it appears.
It was rapidly obsoleted by the appearance of cheaper machines like the EMU Emulator and, later, the Ensoniq Mirage, possibly the first sampler normal musicians could afford, as opposed to the studio-bought beasts of yore.
Great stuff.
