Eventide's Retrospective Flashback #10 - Thinking Outside the Black BoxAs part of its 50th Anniversary celebration, Eventide introduces its Flashback legacy product profile series to highlight groundbreaking Eventide products that pioneered unprecedented ways to bend, distort, and manipulate sound. The latest in the series -- Flashback #10 - Thinking Outside the Black Box -- features a product representative of Eventide's audio technology leadership beyond audio processing tools: the first known piece of instrumentation that was incorporated inside a general-purpose computer -- the Eventide THS224 spectrum analyzer for the Commodore PET computer. Eventide had considered developing a spectrum analyzer in the 1970s, though the task was daunting for a company of its size. "When we got our first PET and saw how much of the spectrum analyzer was already there, we heard the call of the unused space," Eventide co-founder and chairman Richard Factor recounts in Flashback #10. Having already applied its prowess in digital memory to developing third-party memory expansion cards for Commodore PET -- the first true "personal computer" -- and as the analog interface and filter set were simple designs for Eventide, the non-trivial challenges remaining were largely software-based (given the technology of the day, more time may have been spent on the fascinating manual than on product development). Flashback #10 and the rest of the series provide readers a true historical perspective on the company and the technology that fostered audio's significant advances over the last five decades. The Eventide 50th Flashback episodes can be found at the following links: Flashback #1: The PS101 Instant Phaser Flashback #2.1: The DDL 1745 Delay Flashback #2.2: The DDL 1745A Delay Flashback #2.3: The DDL 1745M Delay Flashback #3: The Omnipressor Flashback #4.1: The H910 Harmonizer Flashback #4.2: H910 Harmonizer - The Product Flashback #4.3: H910 Harmonizer -"Minds Blown" Flashback #5: FL 201 Instant Flanger Flashback #6: HM80 - The Baby Harmonizer Flashback #7.1: The H949 Harmonizer Flashback #7.2: H949 Harmonizer - The New One Flashback #7.3: H949 Harmonizer - Bending, Stretching, and Twisting Time Flashback #8: H969 Harmonizer Flashback #9.1: Broadcast Flashback #9.2: Dump & Go - The Profanity Delay Flashback #10: Thinking Outside the Black Box 
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