Here's another company with a proud history that I had pretty much totally ignored. Alesis had been making studio effects and performance synths for years, as well as the ubiquitous SR-16 drum machine, but none of these really caught my eye until they offered their ModFx line-- a group of modular, digital effects that tweaked out semi-normal functions and bent a few of the rules I'd always liked bending: sample-and-hold waveshapes as LFO sources, envelope controlled modulation, compression as a special effect, and bit-reduction distortion. Great stuff.
The ModFx line was a find, simply because they were immediately unpopular, discontinued quickly, and sold at a fraction of their list price. Tabletop studio effects couldn't really compete with the rapidly expanding VST plugin market the way stompboxes could, and all-plastic construction with dubious build quality didn't help. Though these effects are billed as modular, with digital connectors on the sides allowing one ModFx to connect to the next (thus eliminating the need for multiple AD/DA conversions), I have never gotten the digital signal path to work.
Then again, I never paid more than $50 for one of these, so I've certainly gotten my money's worth.