ReBirth and Reason. A Rack With Cables on the Back

The music program Reason had a key that made people fall in love with it. On the screen stood a studio rack full of devices, and if you pressed Tab, the rack turned its back panel toward you. There hung the cables. They sagged in arcs from socket to socket, you could pull them out with the mouse and plug them in somewhere else, and the sound immediately went a new way. People who had never seen a Moog modular synthesizer spent whole nights behind that back panel, finding out what would happen if you plugged this cable in right here.

The rack was invented in Stockholm. In 1994 three programmers, Ernst Nathorst-Böös, Marcus Zetterquist and Peter Jubel, founded the company Propellerhead Software there. In English slang a propeller head is an oddball obsessed with technology, and the three Swedes lived up to their name quickly. Their first program was ReCycle, which cut a recorded drum loop into individual hits so that the loop could be sped up and slowed down without changing its pitch.