Roland D-50
Roland's first fully digital synth (1987), which stitched short samples onto subtractive synthesis and called the result LA synthesis.
Memory was expensive in 1987, so storing whole instrument sounds was out of the question. Roland's answer, Linear Arithmetic, kept the part the ear relies on most to recognise an instrument — the hammer strike, the bow scrape, the breath of a wind player — as a short PCM sample and let a synthesised tone carry the rest. Built-in digital reverb and chorus covered the seams.
The D-50 was Roland's reply to the Yamaha DX7 and became the sound of the late eighties: sweeping pads like the factory preset Fantasia, and the Pizzagogo pizzicato that carries Enya's Orinoco Flow. The same technique went into the MT-32 MIDI module that year, and from there into a generation of PC games.