Yeah, I remember those days, in 1985 my keyboard player in my band borrowed this "amazing keyboard" from the music shop he worked at - he rocks in with this Ensoniq Mirage under his arm. **Wow, real instrument sounds!!**
From then on, DX7 electric piano sounds were dead. Everyone wanted real sounds, no synthesis crap. TR909's landed on the market but couldn't sell. Noooooo, it HAD to be a Linn Drum or SCI Drumtrax. My God, even TR707's were considered "real" drum sounds, with their 0.5 second crash and ride cymbals.
I picked up my BLUE SH101 with matching handgrip in the late '80s for $120 in a 2nd hand shop, as well as a Yamaha CS01 and SHS-10 keytar for less than that again together! I got a TB303 bassline for $100, I snapped up 2 TX81Z's for a couple of hundred each at the time, a Casio CZ101 for about $100 and a Casio SK-8 for about $30. None of those keyboards were more than about 6 years old when I bought them. So the'80s were kind to me, look at all of them now (maybe not the TX's) and the prices they're fetching! And the embarrassing old "analog" TR909 has had the last laugh of them all!!
I'm a real sound tweaker, I rarely end up using the preset sounds on a keyboard, so I'm grateful to still have "synths" that you can tweak. I do have a Casio FZ-1 sampler, which is more a synth than it is a sampler because it has an amazing amount of parameters to apply to samples, and a DCF with wicked resonance!
The 80's. What a crazy time!
Cheers, Graham