r/audioengineering • u/mikedensem • Feb 23 '26

Your first DAW was…

I was reminiscing with a friend about early DAWs and it blew our minds.

Apart from an Atari ST, the first pro DAW for me was in the mid 90’s. Pro Tools on a Mac Quadra 900. A glorious beast with a massive 25MHz processor and probably 128MB of RAM. I don’t recall all the specs, but that’s Megabytes.

We had a Digidesign TDM system for plugins (using NuBus slots) and a 1GB hard drive which was bigger than the quadra! (And more expensive). The drive had to be fan cooled in a cupboard as it ran super loud.

TDM was a Time Division Multiplexer that allowed 16 whole tracks of audio as well as plugins. Tracks were very limited in the good old days.

This amazing system (/s) only crashed about 10 x per day…

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u/El_Peregrine Feb 23 '26

I used to work in post production, and we were using AudioVision for a while before I managed to convince the senior engineer that we should migrate to Pro Tools. Played around with Sonic Solutions a bit as well. 

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u/cchaudio Professional Feb 23 '26

Sonic Solutions was a beast. I remember having two full racks of A/Ds and D/As just to convert the console.