This man is David Vorhaus. He's the man who, in 1979, sampled a full orchestra playing a short chord into a Fairlight Series I. He was friends with Peter Vogel, and his sample became ORCH5, the most famous preset sound ever. It's this [tiny mp3],an ochestral stab, which was used on dozens of 80s records (and there's more than a hint of ORCH5 in the new Destiny's Child single). In April 2004, Robert Fink, associate professor of Musicology at UCLA, presented a paper called "The Story of ORCH5". He talked about the use of ORCH5 in Afrika Bambaataa's 'Planet Rock' (for which programmer John Robie played an 8-finger chord with the sample). After a while, he concluded that "John Robie’s ORCH5 blasts capture, perhaps by accident, the sad revenant of European classical music in a single digital sound. They are classical ghosts, trapped in the hip-hop machine."
David Vorhaus was in White Noise with Delia Derbyshire. I've never heard them, but judging from the reviews here and here, I'd like to. David owns a VCS3, serial #0001 which is the first ever synth built in Europe. In the pic he's playing his Kaleidophon double bass-inspired synth controller. Read David's story here.
amazing...I've read the story in Sound on Sound and own two of his CDs (the oldest with Delia Derbyshire and the newest namely), but I didn't know about the Fairlight thing...