Hey, efflux. The bottom image, are those vaccume tubes?
NPR used to play a radio broadcast called Echoes every night from 10-11pm if i remember and i used to record all of the electronic music on old fuji cassettes. Apparently they ran out of funding and stopped playing the broadcast in the So-Cal area which as much funding as NPR gets it is a load of crap.
Software has a long way to go to come close to real hardware synths. Some decent programs though for sound design for software i want to look into is some stuff by Steinberg, Spectrasonics, IK Multimedia, reFX and Auturia.
A killer synth i am looking into is the Alesis Andromeda 6. It's a wooping 3K$ but it is supposed to be one of the best analog hardware synths currently available. Some day i will buy it even if i have to make monthly payments. Two of my main musical interests are film scores/my own made up scores of course and acousti-electronic genres.
http://www.retrothing.com/2005/12/alesis_a6_andro.html