The Musical Instrument Digital Interface grew from an original proposal for a "Universal Synthesizer Interface" by Sequential Circuits Inc in 1981. By 1982 several other manufacturers including Oberheim, E-mu, Yamaha, Korg and Roland were involved and an optically isolated 31.25kBaud interface was evolving, but was primarily concerned with note triggering only. A counter proposal was made later in 1982 by several Japanese manufacturers which included other operations, a lot based on the Roland parallel DCB interface, and which introduced the Status and Data structure. SCI then combined both proposals to form the MIDI specification and placed it into the public domain. It was first made public in October 1982 with the first products appearing in 1983 and was adopted by most of the world's electronic musical instrument manufacturers within the first year.

MIDI's strength lies in being fully specified and suitable for the purpose it was intended and most manufacturers adopted it with that spirit resulting in a worldwide standard that is still in use over 20 years since its introduction. Nobody licenses or polices MIDI, it is a co-operative standard. When used for its original purpose it works well, when used for other purposes, such as timecode, it is dubious. When used directly instrument to instrument it works as well as it can, when a modern multitasking computer is used or another serial standard relays it, the timing may become questionable. The sheer number of MIDI instruments made ensures that MIDI is not going to go away or change.