Im trying to remember, but I cant think of what Philip Glass used for the Powwaqatsi soundtrack. Throughout that disk, its hard to tell where the real instruments are and the sampled ones come in, and that was in 1988.

I read that the live version of the soundtrack was performed using a stack of eight akai s-950's but he may have used an emulator III originally.

I have gotten great results with an E6400 with the 128 voice board and 128mb of ram. I found that if you come across a good sample bank, it can be loaded painlessly.

The key is the envelopes. Envelopes are key in realism.