Finale came out in (I believe) 1988, and it should immediately or very
quickly have been available in the UK. It had regular upgrades until
about 1991, then it vanished until about 1994. I first began hearing
about Sibelius (running on Acorn) in the early nineties. The first set
of features for Sib I ever saw was a litany of c. 1994 Finale
shortcomings. (My impression from talking to Rutter was that he switched
from Finale to Sib in mid-90s, but I may have been mistaken.)
BTW: this was true of *every* Finale competitor, not just Sib. Igor and
Graphire feature lists also read as litanies of Finale shortcomings. The
only exception I can think of is SCORE, which was a completely different
beast and certainly predated Finale anyway.
There was that ultra-expensive Synclavier system that some were working
on in Dartmouth in the early eighties. This certainly predated Finale,
and it may have been a precursor to Sib. But I don't think it bore much
resemblance to the Mac/Win program that came out in the 90s.
I have never spoken with the brothers Finn, so my comments derive mostly
from observations of their marketing materials and spokespersons during
the time since they in fact came into competition with Finale.
BTW: In all fairness, Finale v1.0's feature list read as a litany of
shortcomings of Professional Composer. It's a short road that never
turns. MOTU took a stab at keeping up with Mosaic, but ultimately that
technology ended up as an ancillary in DP, where it lives on to this
day. (I can still open my old ProCo files in DP, well enough to play
them and to export them as MIDI files.) MM may be headed down a similar
path as MOTU. A great path for the company but perhaps not so great for
Finale. OTOH, Finale is top-quality program, so history may not take the
same turns.
--
Robert Patterson
http://RobertGPatterson.com
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