My understanding of the history of csound is as follows:- In 1968 Barry
Vercoe produced his first version of the MusicN family of programs, Music
360. Written in IBM 360 assembler it was machine-specific to the IBM
360/370 family of mainframe computers, but for me at least ran very well
in the wee small hours.  Its origins, of course go back to Max Mathews
MusicIV program written at Bell Telephone Laboratories (1962) and subject
itself to a number of improvements, such as Music IVB, the work of Godfey
Winham at Princeton University (1966-7).  Matthews himself produced a
FORTRAN (and hence portable) version called MusicV also in 1968, but the
lineage to csound is via MUSIC360.  

In 1973 Barry Vercoe produced Music11.  This again was in assembler and
machine-specific to the PDP11.  Since this is a minicomputer many studios
were able to run it (under licence) on their own machines. I believe I may
have been the first licensee to run it on the LSI version of the PDP, the
PDP11/23, here at the University of Durham in the UK. It is sobering to
reflect that Music 11 would run in just 64k (yes 64k) of memory, and
although there were practical restrictions on memory intensive functions
such as reverb it was perfectly possible to generate complex multivoice
textures.  You still had to wait around though for the machine to number
crunch and for big synthesis runs a good local restaurant was a must.

Csound emerged directly from Music11 in 1986. I believe he would have
liked to have called it MusicC, but since Richard Moore had developed a
rival synthesis program called Cmusic at UCSD in 1985 the potential for
confusion is obvious. Initially Csound ran at MIT on Vaxes and MicroVaxes
under Unix 4.2 BSD and on Hewlett Packard Bobcat workstations under
HP-Unix, but others managed to make it go on PDP11s Expanding the memory
to 128K worked wonders in this respect. The rest,as they say, is history.


Peter Manning