The MC-8 was based on a prototype developed by Canadian Ralph Dyck, a composer and technologist who did research and development for Roland. Roland switched to the then brand new Intel 8080A 8-bit microprocessor and increased the RAM from 512 bytes to 16KB, allowing storage of over 5,300 notes, which could be entered via the calculator keyboard (the preferred method) or recorded in real-time (not so easy). Backup was via cassette and could take 45 minutes to an hour for a three- or four-minute piece of music to back up and verify. The memory was volatile, so a loss of power meant complete loss of data. All parameters were variable so the scale and time-base could be assigned number values to suit the needs of the piece being programmed. This made the machine extremely versatile but somewhat unfriendly to approach for the first time.