I can thank MIDI for getting me into programming. I was 6 at the time and just received an awesome, second hand Yamaha keyboard with MIDI out. I spent that summer researching everything I could about connecting this amazing instrument to my 386 PC. From that research came a love of discovery, technology, openness, creation. A love affair with music was the spark that created a love affair with computing and my eventual career.
Thank you MIDI.
edit: Also, anyone remember early MIDI sharing sites? Way before Napster, the MIDI/MOD scene was incredible. Still remember dreaming about the Soundfonts, AWE32 and XM!
On the Commodore Amiga, I listened to MOD files a lot. Didn't have MP3 at the time (I remember how exciting it was when I got my first MP2 encoder!), and a wave file of a whole song took up nearly half of my hard drive. Very impractical.
An the Impulse Tracker (+ the fact that it was developed on asm)! For me Jeffrey Lim was the coolest developer then.
Oh, I remember the playback of my first mp3 file with winamp on my 486 DX4 100 with 4mb RAM. I couldn't even move the mouse without getting stammered playback.
My first soundcard was a GUS Ultrasound, and after that I saved for quite some time to buy an AWS64 Gold. I loved that soundcard, kept it forever. I used it with Scream Tracker 3 and later Impulse Tracker 2. I've never actually left trackers either. To this day I still use Renoise (http://www.renoise.com), a loose FastTracker variant with vsti, rewire, effects, and more.
It was so fantastic when I could control my synthesizers over MIDI from a tracker.
Thank you MIDI.
edit: Also, anyone remember early MIDI sharing sites? Way before Napster, the MIDI/MOD scene was incredible. Still remember dreaming about the Soundfonts, AWE32 and XM!