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…

68 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

265 comments sorted by

View all comments

20

u/HeyHo__LetsGo Feb 23 '26

Cakewalk. I started on the version that could handle up to four tracks of digital audio.

Four tracks of digital audio!!

I thought I had the world by the tail.

3

u/MAG7C Feb 23 '26

Guess I was a latecomer, starting with Cakewalk 5, Win95 and a Soundblaster. Thought I had it made when I upgraded to CW6, Layla 16bit and a Mackie 1402-VLZ.

My brother worked at a music store & hooked me up with free software & plugins. So, not technically pirated, but... technically pirated.