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In 1967, Dr. George Watson, working for North American Rockwell, now known as Rockwell International, was assigned to a project which would ultimately produce the world's first digital organ.
The effort leading to the project was managed by Ralph Deutsch and was probably initiated in response to an anticipated downturn in the aerospace business. Rockwell wanted to develop commercial markets for their space-age "MOS/LSI" circuit devices, and the electronic organ industry was one of their targets.
Looking back, Rockwell's proposals to somehow interject their exotic new technology into the then older, proven analog world of electronic organs was met with a lot of skepticism by most of the organ companies of that day. It was perceived as radical and financially questionable. Indeed, the success of the project would require an expensive and extraordinary effort — plus conceptual breakthroughs. Fate brought George Watson to the scene. In retrospect, he was the right person in the right place at the right time to "pull it off."
Aside from his strong engineering background, Watson had some musical experience with a small, home-type electronic organ. He knew that using "MOS/LSI" technology to build an organ would require radically new approaches such as the intensive use of time-division multiplexing.
One of his most elegant insights was recognizing that an organist can hardly play more than twelve keys simultaneously. In other words, people rarely use more than ten fingers and two feet to press the keys. Therefore, twelve tone-generating entities are sufficient in the organ — as long as each of the twelve entities can "play" any of the keys of the instrument. He invented the concept of "note-generator assignment" to handle, in real time, the incredible coordination between rapidly changing key patterns and the "note-limited," general-purpose tone generators. Many other problems had to be solved and new techniques invented.
Watson's system was a brilliant technical achievement. In 1971, it was first incorporated into a commercial product known as the Allen Digital Computer Organ. The electronic musical instrument industry would never be the same. Many of the organ companies in existence in the 1970s steadfastly refused to accept the power of the new technology. However, by the early 1980s, the rush to adopt Watson's "note-limited system" was underway; today, virtually every synthesizer, electronic keyboard, electronic organ, and the like utilizes the invention described in George Watson's pioneering U.S. Patent 3,160,799.
In today's electronic ambiance — TV, radio, cassettes, compact discs, musical scoring of movies, etc. — which all make extensive use of electronic keyboards — most people are actually listening to a reflection of George Watson's genius. A spate of "historical" articles has appeared in recent years in electronic music publications with never a mention of George Watson. This is a sad commentary on the depth of knowledge of present-day commentators and writers in this field.