I'm not so much griping at the idea of characterizing it as a media machine, but one of the first? It's not even one of the first digital multitrack recorders.
The Fairlight was aimed at the high end music market. It did some very specific things and nothing but those very specific things. It was super-useful for music production, but it was - in its high-end way - a closed end user product, not an open development system.
The problem with the Cube - aside from the price - was that the DSP hardware was still quite slow. Although you could develop your own applications they were very limited compared to the commercial synths, samplers, and FX processors that were available commercially.
So it was only really useful for prototyping new concepts for applications, rather than producing finished applications.
That's where Max came from. Initially it was a very minimal sort-of-modular MIDI processor. The IRCAM merged it with their Cube-based synthesis and processing system. Eventually that became Max/MSP, a commercial product with both MIDI and audio generation and processing. (Then video and low-level custom DSP were added, but those are much more recent.)
Miller Puckette, the original author of Max, left IRCAM and went on to develop Pure Data (Pd) as an open source alternative. Pd introduced realtime audio processing. Max integrated Pd's DSP code and became Max/MSP. MSP stands for 'multi signal processing' or 'Miller S. Puckette'. (Miller himself named Max after computer music pioneer Max Mathews.)
Yeah, but at the same time a comparable plain 'business' Mac (without soundcard and DAC cost in the order of $5000). So, $10K is not so far off if you have a regular studio (most regular pro gear had comparable prices and you needed dozens of them, H3000s, compressors, reverbs, and so on) or a music research facilicy, etc.
