E-mu systems was a pioneer in the manufacture of low-cost digital sampling music workstations. The E-mu Emulator was a floppy-disk based keyboard workstation which enabled the musician to "sample" sounds, recording them to non-volatile media and allowing the samples to be played back as musical notes on the keyboard. The floppy disk enabled the owner to build a library of samples and share them with others, or buy pre-recorded libraries on disk.

Following the Emulator II and III, the company also began producing a line of rack-mount modules called the E-mu "Proteus", containing pre-recorded samples in ROM. At its introduction, the Proteus had a relatively large library of high-quality samples for a previously unheard-of price, and was easily used with any MIDI keyboard.

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