RCA Mark II

Harry Olson and Herbert Belar at RCA were really after synthesising popular music without musicians. The 1955 Mark I proved it could be done; the Mark II added more oscillators and a second paper-roll reader. Pitch, timbre, envelope and volume were punched as binary codes onto a wide paper roll, and the output was cut to lacquer disc at first, later to tape.

The machine went to the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center, where Milton Babbitt became its most devoted user. He loved the precision: rhythms no human could play were suddenly writable. Charles Wuorinen's Time's Encomium, made on the Mark II, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. The pop music never materialised, but it was the first synthesizer that could reasonably be called programmable.