MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a serial protocol for interfacing musical instruments (and often lighting and such); it runs over 5-pin DIN cables at 31.25kbps. A MIDI connection carries a sequence of messages. One class of message, the system exclusive (SYSEX) message, can cary arbitrary data, and is keyed with a manufacturer and model code.

If one was to allocate one manufacturer/model code pair to a special type of SYSEX message containing an IP datagram, one could tunnel TCP/IP over MIDI cables, sharing the same cable with existing MIDI traffic.

Granted, it would be horribly slow, but not as slow as some other transports (such as RFC1149). And think of the hack value.
-- acb, Mar 29 2001

People asking themselves the same thing back in '89. http://www-mice.cs....04.mm.www/0118.html
As Peter da Silva points out to Henry Spencer, MIDI is unidirectional. [jutta, Mar 29 2001]

Don't forget "Midi Maze", the multiplayer maze game you could play by connecting a bunch of Atari ST's in a MIDI daisy-chain (no little box necessary!).
-- egnor, Mar 29 2001


MIDI is undirectional - but you can always create a MIDI loop; that way messages can get from and to all devices.
-- monojohnny, May 29 2006



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