The machine nobody remembers
Between 1980 and 1985, in a Lucasfilm building in San Rafael, California, a handful of engineers built the first digital audio workstation.
On the SoundDroid's touchscreen, sound became a ribbon you could take hold of, stretch and move through time. Editing was non-destructive, disk-based and programmable, years before those words described everyday tools. The team got the future almost exactly right, and still sold not a single machine.
DROIDS follows the whole arc: how Sprocket Systems came together, how the machine was designed and programmed, how THX and the Deep Note grew up beside it, and how the project wound down while its ideas moved on into Sonic Solutions, Pixar and the wider audio industry.
Years later George Lucas counted it among his landmarks: “I’ve helped move cinema from a chemical-based medium to a digital-based medium.”
