[tb303]

Not a new thing at all, you're right.

Sidenote, totally trivial, but in case you care: Orbital only recently (past 5 years) moved to Ableton as a control hub, but still use a ton of outboard gear. Before that they were running the rig off Alesis MMT-8s, and famous for doing so. Those would trigger loops, yes, but they would trigger those loops in samplers, which is why most orbital tracks loops are limited to starting, stopping, looping, and getting cut up a tiny bit, not much more. The MMT-8s are essentially step sequence loopers and arrangers, kind of the most frustrating form of what the MPC-style offers. But since they were masters of them, there was no reason to switch until something better (Ableton) came along.