Cybotron (Washtenaw Community College)

Before the Belleville Three had a name for what they were doing, Juan Atkins was already inventing it. In a music class at Washtenaw Community College, the teenage Atkins met Rik Davis — a Vietnam veteran a dozen years older who owned synthesizers and one of the first Roland sequencers. They bonded over machines and formed Cybotron, a mash-up of “cyborg” and “cyclotron.”

Their 1981 debut “Alleys of Your Mind,” on Atkins’ own Deep Space label, sold some 15,000 copies in Detroit after the Electrifying Mojo played it; 1983’s “Clear” became an electronic landmark, later sampled by Missy Elliott. And in 1983 they released “Techno City” — the single that, more or less, gave the genre its name. Atkins carried the word “techno” (borrowed in part from Alvin Toffler’s “techno rebels”) with him when he left to start Metroplex. The future got named in a community-college classroom.