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The Moog's biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with "Switched-on Bach," popularizing electronic music with Moog-made renditions of Johann Sebastian Bach. Canadian pianist and Bach interpreter Glenn Gould said that Carlos' Fourth Brandenburg Concerto was "the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs -- live, canned or intuited -- that I've ever heard."

The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic "Because," on "Abbey Road," the last album they recorded. The instrument was somehow perfectly suited to the layered, atmospheric vocals and John Lennon's ethereal lyrics. In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" with electronic Beethoven whose gleeful perversity helped lend the movie its malevolent sheen.

Still, these were products of studio recording. It took musicians with a talent for excess -- such as keyboardist Keith Emerson -- to tote the enormous Moog setup, a towering box of electronics, onto the stage for live shows. Ever mindful of utility, Moog next introduced the portable, performance-minded Minimoog. Rock-oriented musicians like Jan Hammer showed that the synthesizer could be used as an expressive lead instrument. Jazzers like Josef Zawinul used the instrument to "add new colors to the traditional sound world of jazz," says Doug Keislar, editor of the Computer Music Journal.

"It was really the advent of the Minimoog that saw synthesizers take off," Keislar says. "The Minimoog showed that there was a significant market for portable, cheaper synthesizers." Or as Moog put it, in typically dry fashion, "By 1974 or so, having a Minimoog would make it a lot easier to get a job playing the local Ramada Inn."

The Minimoog became the gold standard. "He hit it so right, everyone realized that was the way to do it. So everyone did it more or less the same," says Joel Chadabe, author of "Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music," who has known Moog since 1965. "Underlying all this was a basic quality. The sound of his instruments was really good."

A century after Thomas Edison reproduced the first recorded sound, the synthesizer began to spread into musical genres from the avant-garde to jazz. In 1977, the instrument took a central role in emerging forms of electronic music, with Donna Summer's hit dance single, "I Feel Love," created almost entirely on Moog synthesizers, and German band Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express," an album of purely technological music.

"The spirit of the times was very exciting," says Chadabe, who also serves as president of the Electronic Music Foundation. "You could start a basement business and really have an impact. Later on the real businessmen came in with their accountants and financial planning and a lot of capital, and the business matured."

Moog admits he didn't have much of a head for the business end; his main goal has always been creating useful technology. "My transition from scientist to entrepreneur?" he asked in an e-mail. "Some would say that I still haven't made that transition," he joked. "I suddenly found myself in a growing business and I didn't know how to run it," Moog wrote of his early days. "I didn't know anything at all about business back then. I didn't know what a balance sheet was. I didn't know what cash flow was. So the business survived as long as it grew, but as soon as a contraction occurred, I ran out of money."

In quick fashion, Moog's family business was bought out. The Micromoog was the last synthesizer created by Moog to bear his name. After musical instrument manufacturer Norlin took over his company, including synthesizer design, Moog spent the rest of his days at the company designing guitar effects, guitar amplifiers "and similar small electronic stuff." He left Moog Music in 1977, blaming corporate politics for his departure.

When the Polymoog went into production in 1976, Moog says, "reliability-wise it was a disaster." It had been created by Norlin's new head of synthesizer design, David Luce. And why did Luce design synthesizers for Norlin while the man they were named for "was assigned to the technological provinces"? Just like his school days in Queens, Moog says, it came down to social skills: "Luce liked to go out and drink and socialize with the Norlin brass, and I didn't, or maybe couldn't."

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