Non-musicians sometimes associate MIDI only with .mid music files, or with the late 80’s General MIDI sound sets. But it is so much more than that. For musicians, MIDI is essential to everything from instrument synchronization to stage lighting and effects control, to sequencing, beat making and more. MIDI is the glue that helps make electronic music possible.

MIDI 1.0
At the 1983 NAMM Show, Roland and Sequential Circuits showcased a new open cross-company digital standard for connecting two or more musical instruments together, ushering in an era of electronic music production using MIDI as we have now known and loved it for decades.

The initial MIDI specification was quite simple: short 1-3 byte messages over a DIN serial cable, running at a speed of about one millisecond per message, chained together so that a five note chord would take approximately 5ms to send – a perfectly acceptable speed given the low-cost technology available at the time.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsex...ith-midi-just-got-a-real-boost-in-windows-11/