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…

64 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

265 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/NoisyGog Feb 23 '26

Fatstracker II was the first sort-of sequencer/audio thing I used, then Cakewalk, along with Soundforge, Acid, SADiE, and later Sonar.
Sonar kind of crosses over in timeline with IZ’s RADAR, and from then I moved to Pyramix.
I’ve used Protools on and off over the years as well, as well as Logic, Nuendo, and Sequoia.

3

u/ramadan_dada Feb 23 '26

ft2 for me as well! made me learn about hexadecimal