Brian Eno on Generative Art, Part II
Part II

"My records, however, were always recordings of the output of one or another of these combinatorial systems: though it could produce original music forever, what went on the record was a 30-minute section of its output, which would then of course be identical each time you played it. However, what I always wanted to do was to sell the system itself, so that a listener would know that the music was always unique. Since this would have involved persuading my listeners to buy four or five CD-players instead of just one, and then to buy the set of four or five CDs to play on them, I didn't spend too much time on the project.
But with computer technology I began to think that there might be a way of doing it. I was inspired initially by certain screensavers- those little graphic devices that use very little computer memory but keep generating new images on the screen. I wrote several proposals based on the idea of using the computer to make music in a similar manner- not as a way of replaying huge chunks of preformed material (which was what was being done, to devastatingly miserable effect, with CD-Roms at the time) but instead as a place where compositional 'seeds' provided by the composer would be grown. I thought this made composing into a kind of genetic activity- in the sense that the compositional 'seeds' were actually interacting sets of rules and parameters rather than precise musical descriptions. I imagined the piece evolving out of the interaction of these probabilistic rule-sets- and therefore evolving differently in each performance.
Since I know nothing about writing code for computers, this would probably have remained a pipedream were it not for a company called Sseyo who had been thinking on exactly the same lines."

From "A Year With Swollen Appendices", pp. 330-1