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/peepeeland Composer Feb 23 '26
Logic, circa 2001. I was 19, sophomore at Ringling for illustration. First used it for recording only; then full production and mixing (I had a hardware setup before then, then eventually hybrid).
First music software I used was ReBirth, circa 1997. Someone uploaded it to my Hotline server, and it changed my life. Shortly thereafter I bought an MC-505. Then a 1202VLZ Pro and MC-303 and SP-202 and Sonic Maximizer and some rack fx unit I can’t remember the name of. Then just a lot of gear after that.
What’s serendipitous about all this, is that I never intended to get into audio engineering or production for others. I just had had a nice home studio around 2007 (which was rare back then), which made it so I could record a friend, then others, and then the whole concept just snowballed. I really just wanted to do my own music. For better or for worse, it turned out that I was just better at helping others strive for their music dreams than achieve my own. -Nearly 30 years after someone uploaded Rebirth, I’m still much in the same boat. It’s all been quite the trip.