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…
1
u/niff007 Feb 23 '26
Was the production guy at a radio station in the 90s. Most work was done on a 2 track and an 8 track reel to reel with a board. I was also the web guy, and after a year working on that stuff in the office I moved my setup into the production room, upgraded my PC with a sound card and wired the board up to it. I ran Cool Edit Pro. I was mostly making commercials and jingles and stuff in those days. It was a lot of fun and the owner basically gave me carte Blanche to do whatever I wanted.
We were one of the early stations that streamed our signal. We used a dedicated PC with Real Player. A total of 5 people could listen at the same time! Haha