Ems

The company’s first commercial synthesiser, the VCS 3, designed by David Cockerell, was produced in 1969. It was developed in the basement of Zinovieff’s house and was nicknamed “The Putney” after the London suburb where he was living at the time. EMS original aim was to create a versatile monophonic synthesiser that would retail for just £100. While this proved unattainable in practice, the company nevertheless succeeded in manufacturing and selling the VCS3 for just £330, less than its nearest American competitor the Minimoog (which originally retailed for US$1495 when released in 1970) and far cheaper than Moog’s modular systems, which cost thousands of dollars. EMS also released the DK1, a velocity sensitive dynamic monophonic keyboard controller for use with VCS3; this included an extra VCO and VCA and retailed for £145. It is not widely known that EMS electronic equipment was mostly made by another company “Hilton Electronics” based in Wareham, Dorset. Although EMS lost track of the instrument in 1983, it survived and in the United States, until 2019 when musician Simon Desorgher sold it to the Goldsmiths College, University of London Electronic Music Studios. (Wikipedia Source)