When Kate Bush’s ethereal tune “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” appeared on an episode of Stranger Things, it racked up a couple of billion streaming listens, and a reported $2.3 million in royalties, on its way to a maiden No. 1 chart position, just 36 years and 310 days after its 1985 release. Bush will get the lion’s share of those royalties because she wrote the song by herself and also performed it by herself using a machine that at the time seemed more science fiction than settled science.

The Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, responsible for that unforgettably futuristic-sounding single-note line accompanying the drums in the song’s beginning, was the first musical instrument in history that could, in theory, sound like anything else in the world. In addition to a nearly limitless array of synthetic sounds such as the “CELLO2” tone that opens “Running Up That Hill,” it could record just over one second of anything you wanted, then play it back at any one of 73 different pitches, via two keyboards. Early demonstrations often used a human voice or the opening note of Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird” as conducted by Stravinsky himself with the New York Philharmonic in 1960, a sampled sound that has since appeared in hundreds of records by artists as diverse as Eurythmics, N.W.A., and Bruno Mars.