Oh yeah...I remember. In my school back in Soviet Union we had a computer lab with MSX machines. I remember my teacher could load programs, remotely reset and do a few other such things from their console.

Reading the documentation, it seems the network was explicitly created for teaching. The instructions refer to the case of a classroom of 15 students and a teacher. It seems it was possible to load programs, send mail, private messages, check network status.

Yamaha was quite good at glomming networking features on top of MIDI. They did it in a few ways - I remember double-taking in a Tokyo ops room when I saw a Yamaha C1 being used as a server for a bunch of CX5M's .. traditionally a game or music-making setup, but in this case it was electronic mail and bulletin-boards .. in Japanese ..

Anyway MIDI lives on today because its a great little easy networking protocol, easy to implement and suddenly your device can communicate to a lot of other interesting things..

So it was MIDI! I suspected as much but could not find any documentation.

Funny that since it was the first network I've seen I was naturally expecting all networks to use mini-DIN cables and daisy chaining. The next network, many years later, was a co-axial setup - my mind was blown.

Android is getting MIDI support with M, iirc.

There were a lot of these in the 8-bit era.

Here's an interview with a guy who built one for Atari 8-bits.

http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-10-the-atari-...