Comment by Applejinx

On top of that, not all drum machines are created equal. There are whole genres based on 808s, 909s, 303s combined with these… using DINsync, which involves retriggering internal hardware clocks on the machines at trigger rise-time speed. rather than sending a succession of MIDI notes. That stuff is still 'electronic clocks' but not in the sense of 'lives on a computer that triggers notes', in the sense of 'sequencers firing notes very simultaneously'.

That's a timing lock that's tighter than the usual sort in recent generations. There are DAWs (Renoise) that pride themselves on being able to send MIDI with less slop and irregularity (nice trick since MIDI is a serial bus, but you'd think it'd be more common to get right). There are whole genres (see: psytrance) that do very well in trackers which can fire sample-accurate notes simultaneously without resorting to MIDI.

Even though it's of the machine, the groove of an 808/303 pair synced by DINsync is a different beast from 'snap to grid and autotune'. There's subtleties to everything.