Dusted off my Philip Rees midi thru box (V3) today. Battery still works fine. Last used...2001? Insane!
The what? Midi patchbay like thingy?
Tiny little thing, 1 MIDI in, 3 MIDI thru, good for patching all yr sound modules to one sequencer (which I was doing, running Trackman on an ST emulator on my Pentium II, with an ISA and a PCI soundcard!!).
See here, mine is the first one, the V3 - http://www.philrees.co.uk/products/thruunit.htm. It's how I used to do stuff back in ye olde days - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QIho5Z1rxI :)
That box looks quite nifty. Unfortunately, it also looks like Philip Rees is "no longer trading." I have a similar device from Midi Solutions that is powered via the MIDI cable.
http://www.midisolutions.com/prodthr.htm
Hey! I've got one of those lurking in my MIDI trinkets box (along with a MIDI solutions MIDI Merge, and plans for my ill fated home built MIDI patch changer*) Ah yes, the days when I patched together my Yamaha clavinova, Yamaha TG01 and Casio VZ1 - Oh what a swanky live rig I thought I had! 8)
*Actually now, in the days of Arduino and Raspberry Pi, I suspect my gadget would be relatively easy now to implement - I wanted a thingy that stored the set list by name and at the touch of a button/footpedal burst out a series of patch and bank change messages to multiple keyboards. It's just that now, my Fantom G can do just that
fantastic little box