The story
The company's trademark registration for the name "Mark of the Unicorn", granted on
24 February 1987, records first use of the name in commerce on 1 September 1980, and gives
the registrant's address as Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The company states that it was founded in 1980.
The company's earliest products were text-editing tools for CP/M machines. According
to Craig A. Finseth's survey of Emacs implementations, MINCE was first distributed in
1980 and was written in C; the related PerfectWriter,
The FinalWord and FinalWord II products were subsequently sold to
Read the full text
Borland International.
Mark of the Unicorn's Performer MIDI sequencer was released in 1985. Reviewing the
program in Music Technology in 1990, Kendall Wrightson
recalled that computer-based sequencers "were often regarded as a novelty" at the time of
its release, and that Mark of the Unicorn's customers were sequencing on Macintoshes two
years before the Atari ST and Pro24 combination became established.
By 1994 Sound On Sound described Performer as "arguably the best
MIDI sequencer available for the Macintosh, having been around almost as long as the Mac".
Its review of Digital Performer that January covered the addition of hard disk audio
recording, which brought the company into competition with Cubase Audio and Studio
Vision.
Audio interfaces
In 2001 the company released the 828, a rack-mounting FireWire audio interface aimed at
Macintosh models shipped without PCI slots. Reviewing it in July 2001,
Sound On Sound noted that users "have been asking for a serious FireWire audio interface"
and that the unit was already back-ordered.
A redesigned 828 was introduced in 2024 with USB 3.0 in place of FireWire and support for
macOS, Windows and iOS, priced at US$995. MOTU marketing director Jim Cooper told Mix
that the redesign was prompted in part by component shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic,
and repeated the company's claim to priority: "We shipped the very first one in 2001. That was
the first firewire audio interface ever."
From Wikipedia’s article on Mark of the Unicorn, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4