It’s the notorious (and a bit drawn-out) “Throw-Back-Thursday” — and we’ve dug some old PCDJ videos out of the archive for your viewing pleasure.
This January marks PCDJ’s 16th year in business, and it all started with a “bang” in 1998. MP3 technology was the burgeoning new thing, making its way to consumers via sites like MP3.com. There were the usual consumer media players at the time; Winamp and Windows Media Player being the fixtures — but we (Visiosonic) set out to change that with the release of our first DJ software freeware version, PCDJ PHAT — a dual-deck mp3 player with streaming ads that gained over 3 million downloads in about 6 months time.
PCDJ PHAT and the original Digital 1200sl DJ software put PCDJ on the map. It was an exciting time, local Tampa Florida news and national TV stations such as CNN were banging down our door to get the scoop on the hottest new thing in the digital entertainment world. We had local DJ acts (such as ‘Rabbit In The Moon‘) with national audiences performing a major venues with our Digital 1200sl software and the “Space Opera” rig (which consisted of a Gibraltar half drum rack, a korg kaos pad, Numark mixer and about the bulkiest and ugliest computer tower – all mounted into one “live performance piece” that was bleeding edge at the time)
It was during these early years that digital DJ technology was met with extreme prejudice — “computers crash“. Although there were still many early adopters, it wasn’t until 2001 or so that things really took off with DJs like Kerri Chandler, David Sloly, Factor-E and Jason Nevins performing out with computer systems and our RED 5.2 DJ program.
Here’s three old-school PCDJ videos that both took me down memory lane, and reminded me of just how much DJ software technology has evolved:
