Background, Credits, and Acknowledgements


Rogus McBogus has been under development at the MIT Media Laboratory since the summer of 1995. Rogus was originally developed for Macintoshes, using OMS to communicate with MIDI devices, but the current version of Rogus is for Win32 platforms (Windows 95/NT). Version 1.5a was the first public release of Rogus McBogus.

The main reason Rogus McBogus was written was for use in the Brain Opera.

Rogus McBogus was written primarily by Ben Denckla and Patrick Pelletier, with help from Pete Rice and Herb Yang. Thanks to John Yu, Pete Rice, and Kai-Yuh Hsiao for being the first users of Rogus and providing useful feedback. Also, thanks to Eric Metois for sharing his experience in implementing his HyperCC MIDI library for the SGI.

The documentation you are reading now was written primarily by Patrick Pelletier, with some portions taken directly from Ben Denckla's original Rogus documentation.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, or bug reports, send them to rogus-maintainer@media.mit.edu.

Be sure to read the copyright notice for information about using and redistributing Rogus.

Many people have asked where the name "Rogus McBogus" came from. As I (Ben) remember it, here is the story. In the summer of '95, when I started to work on this MIDI library, I wanted to name it something that would have connotations of solidity and reliability as well as beauty. So I chose to name it after a cathedral. The idea also came from something called the Cathedral Toolbox, development software for the short-lived but interesting Macintosh AV series with AT&T DSP3210 processors. So I went to MIT's Rotch Library to look at some pictures of cathedrals and chose Chartes as the one I would name the library after. I think I was punished for this pretension, so as numerous humiliating bugs and problems surfaced in the project, I decided I should name it something more whimsical and relevant to the true nature of the code. The code would often behave in a rogue-like manner, so I decided to use the fake adjective "rogous", purposely misspelled "rogus" to match with "bogus", since the code was also prone to do bogus, as well as rogous, things, and anyway we can imagine "bogus" to be a distorted fake-adjective meaning "containing bugs", i.e. "bugous", or "bugus", or finally "bogus." Rogus McBogus is imagined to be a kind of swarthy cousing of Ronald McDonald, as well.