I've ordered an Ornament and Crime, and it should be here tomorrow. I want to see what all the fuss is about. Because there is, in fact, quite a bit of fuss. If I love it, it will replace my Moskwa. If I don't love it, I'll sell it off, and basically lose the shipping cost, so this is a low-risk adventure.
What is Ornament and Crime? It was originally a digital model of an Analog Shift Register. The Analog Shift Register, or ASR, is sort of an esoteric module with its beginnings, as I understand it, from Serge modulars of the 70s. Imagine a sample and hold, but instead of storing a single voltage, the ASR stores several. Each clock pulse causes the current input to be sent to the first output, and the voltage that was previously at the first output goes to the second output, and so on.
That's maybe a narrow function for a module. But a couple of guys realized that the Ornament and Crime's hardware was really good, with good ADCs, a good OLED screen, a fast processor; and they also realized that its software could be replaced. So they wrote a new operating system, a bunch of "apps," and released this new system as open-source code. The hardware is open-source, too, so a lot of people build these things in several different sizes.
So, it's basically a little computer in eurorack format, on a platform for which I already have some experience writing software. This gives it potential to be exactly the kind of sequencer I want, if I turn out to be willing to put the time into it. I actually don't have much interest in its "built-in" functionality, so I can see myself completely replacing its operating system with my own. Or I might decide that it's a total wrong turn. We'll see....