E-mu Systems was founded in Santa Cruz, CA by Dave Rossum, a UCSC student and two of his friends from Caltech, Steve Gabriel and Jim Ketcham, with the goal to build their own modular synthesizers. Scott Wedge, who would ultimately become president, joined later that summer. In 1972, E-mu became a company, developing and patenting a digitally scanned polyphonic keyboard (1973), licensed for use by Oberheim Electronics in the 4-Voice and 8-Voice synthesizers and by Dave Smith in the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5. E-mu, along with Solid State Micro Technology (SSM), also developed several synthesizer module IC chips, that were used by both E-mu and many other synthesizer companies. (Wikipedia Source)