Last time I plugged in a MIDI setup is quite a while ago. The software in use was version 2.5 of the Deluxe Music Construction Set (Geoff Brown and John MacMillan). The hardware was a Colour Classic (!) and a MIDI enabled e-piano. The software provides an input sheet to write notes and a screen keyboard to be played by mouse or keystrokes. It was possible to let the piano play completely software driven from a document as well as playing the piano manually whilst having the computer taking down the notes to a document in standard musical notation. The software could also output sound through the computer. The setup was not as sophisticated as recent hardware/software combos, but cheap and usable.
I switched on that old CC and found also a demo version of Cubase Score 2 (Steinberg), but I can not remember to have used Cubase successfully on that machine.
And yes, as