Among its most highly touted features was a
A user operated the machine through the 'Edit Controller' which connected to the main unit with a 25' cable that attached to either the front or back of the main unit, or the controller can be affixed onto the front of the main unit.
The Fostex Foundation 2000 was highly modular in that functionality could be added to the system by way of boards slid into the front or back of the main processing unit. On the back of the system, a variety of connectivity options were available such as analog audio,
Internally, the Foundation 2000 hardware is controlled by a Motorola 68030 CPU with a Motorola 68000 inside the Edit Controller to handle the touch-screen display and buttons. In addition to two Motorola 56002 DSPs, each a 40 MHz DSP that operates natively on 24-bit data, on the main CPU boards, the unit could be expanded by adding up to six "Algorithmic Computing Engine" Mix Processors boards, each containing four additional Motorola 56002 DSP processor. A fully loaded Foundation 2000 contains 26 of these programmable processors, however, it is unclear what benefits are gained since the last revision of the software appears to only use them to for signal routing, stereo panning and three-band eq for the machine's 8 audio tracks.
Originally the Foundation 2000 was announced by Fostex to their internal distributors at a distributor meeting but only after all distributors had signed an agreement of confidentiality, as all was top-secret at that time. The sales of the Foundation 2000 was independent of the normal sales from Japan as it was Fostex USA that handled the sales of this product.