This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!