**Origins — E-mu Systems.** In E-mu's own telling, the company began informally in 1971 when Dave Rossum and a few Caltech friends — among them Steve Gabriel and Jim Ketcham — started building synthesizers in a fifties-era house on Water Street in Santa Cruz. Needing a name for the electronics suppliers, they settled on E-mu Systems (pronounced "Ee-myoo"), short for "electronic music"; their very first prototype was nicknamed the "Black Mariah." In the summer of 1972 the group moved to Santa Clara and officially opened for business that November, with Rossum designing the circuits and Scott Wedge running the company. Through the 1970s E-mu thrived as a component innovator: Rossum's digitally scanned polyphonic keyboard was licensed to Oberheim and to Sequential Circuits, where it sat at the heart of the Prophet-5.
**The Fairlight moment.** By 1979–80 E-mu was struggling — its ambitious Audity analog synthesizer drew no orders and Sequential had stopped paying royalties. Encountering the $25,000–$30,000 Fairlight CMI convinced Rossum that E-mu's chip expertise could deliver digital sampling for a fraction of the price. The Emulator was, in company lore, conceived in Scott Wedge's VW Rabbit on the drive home from the May 1980 AES Convention; longtime employee Ed Rudnick found the name "Emulator" in a thesaurus.
**Debut, 1981.** The Emulator was unveiled at NAMM in 1981 — a 66-pound, steel-clad behemoth with a 5.25-inch floppy drive and built-in sequencer, listing at $10,000. It captured roughly two seconds of audio into 128 KB of RAM (via companding DACs) and replayed it across a 49-note keyboard, with one SSM2044 analog low-pass filter per voice giving the samples a warmth purely digital machines lacked. It shipped in 4-voice and 8-voice versions. Unit #0001 was promised to Daryl Dragon of Captain & Tennille but ultimately delivered to Stevie Wonder for his name recognition (Dragon received #0002). Early artistic champions included Patrick Gleason and Michael Boddicker.
**A slow start, then the Mark 2.** Early sales were weak — around 25 units — hampered by a flaw where notes would not stop on key release; the first units carried a Rossum retrofit "kludge." The 1982 "Mark 2" revision corrected key-off behaviour, added a real-time sequencer and a factory diskette library, and cut the price to about $8,000. Total Emulator I production reached roughly 500 units before it was discontinued in early 1984.
**Price disruption and legacy.** Against the $27,500 Fairlight and the $75,000-and-up Synclavier, the Emulator brought sampling within reach of working musicians for the first time. MIDI never arrived from the factory — the spec wasn't finalized until 1983, so EI owners added it through an external JL Cooper box on the serial port. Genuinely rare today (~500 built), the Emulator I is both a collector's piece and the origin point of the affordable-sampler era. It was succeeded by the Emulator II in 1984.