Minimoog. When the Laboratory Was Shrunk to a Keyboard

Around 1969 a Moog engineer named Bill Hemsath came across an old keyboard in the workshop whose upper octaves were missing the plastic caps on their keys. The lower three octaves had survived, and he simply sawed them off. To this stump he connected a few modules that were lying around unused, stuffed it all into a small box and got a synthesizer that could be set on a table. Moog himself treated the idea as an amusing experiment and did not pin any particular hopes on it.

The firm was doing badly in those years. Modular systems were expensive, they were bought by universities and a few studios, there were not enough orders, and the engineers were seriously afraid the company would be shut down. While Moog travelled around looking for investors, Hemsath and his colleagues took the box through several prototypes to the Model D and built about half a dozen units without asking permission. When he came back, Moog scolded them, and then agreed to put the machine into production. That is how the Minimoog appeared, and in 1970 it went on sale.