Dave Smith founded Sequential (Sequential Circuits) in 1974, produced the groundbreaking Prophet-5 synthesizer, and invented MIDI, which had a profound impact o

Dave Smith founded Sequential (Sequential Circuits) in 1974, produced the groundbreaking Prophet-5 synthesizer, and invented MIDI, which had a profound impact on the electronic music industry. In 1987 Sequential went belly up due to some bad business decisions, and its intellectual property was largely purchased by Yamaha. Smith went on to develop some groundbreaking synthesizers for Yamaha and Korg. In 2002 Dave Smith decided to make synthesizers on his own again, but as he did not own the name Sequential any more he resigned himself to naming his company Dave Smith Instruments (or DSI). In 2015, after talking it over with the head of Roland (another major Japanese synth manufacturer), the President of Yamaha decided to unilaterally give Dave Smith the highly prized Sequential trademark (and sequential.com) back. It is my understanding that Dave didn't even know they were going to do this. They just gave him the intellectual property as a gesture of goodwill between synth manufacturers and in recognition of everything he had done. DSI was promptly renamed Sequential. Pixar could learn something from this.