"This thing was going one day when a friend of mine named Edward Fredkin, who’s a professor of computer science at M.I.T., came in, and he said, ‘That sounds pretty good. How did you get it to make those sounds?’ I showed him, and we spent the afternoon making more sounds. Fredkin formed a company to manufacture the machines as toys.”"

I believe this is it:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/06/meet-strange-wonderful...