Cool story! Much of my synth background comes from having grown up around music tech in Nashville. That's actually a hotbed of prototype development, because Nashville's studios are sufficiently laid-back that engineers and producers love to screw around with these things. So I got to see and/or use some crazy things, such as...
An ARP-badged Chroma (only 50 of those came out prior to the CBS buyout)
A DX-1
Peabody College's big Moog system (the one Gil Trythall used)
A McLeyvier (no shit! Valley People were a dealer for those!)
A 360 Systems synth that was actually the rebadged Basyn Minstrel (also at Valley People)
A few Vako Orchestrons (mainly because Vako was in Nashville...explaining Kraftwerk's own Music City connection!)
An Alpha Syntauri (I implemented that thing when it was in MTSU's electronic studio, added a Soundchaser later)
Woodland's prototype Jeep Harned pre-MCI archtop fader desk (it was at a different studio by then)
Monument's bespoke Flickinger desk
The prototype 1U version of the Quantech Room Simulator
And several devices that had been cooked up by engineers there. One that I learned much from was Jim Gilmore, who actually built his own desk from scratch in the early 1980s because he couldn't get a desk that would fit his workflow (advertising and voiceover work). Lots of gear was also modified, with Scully decks being prime devices for that. Definitely a very strange environment for a young musician to grow up in!