In 1965, an Iowa physics student working on satellite signals built what one person has called called "the world's first digital synthesizer." This video unpacks how James Cessna’s “Arbitrary Waveform Generator” worked, and then recreates it as a Disting NT plugin, with a space ambient track to show it in action (patch notes included).

I'm curious to see how people here would classify this strange instrument. It was digital in the sense that it builds a waveform out of discrete amplitude steps and used a digital sequencer to scan them at high speed, like later wavetable or digital oscillator designs. But it still relied on analog amplitude controls. And if it was digital, was it really the "world's first digital synthesizer"?