Your First Ever PC & DAW Combo ?

[Aleatoriac]

I don't remember what the specs were on the machine
I remember no audio monitors, and crappy headphones (environment was noisy).
Cool Edit Pro was it.
Had a Boss GT3, a Korg X3, a Parker Fly, an m-audio PCI interface, crappy crate 1x12 amp, sm57, and that was it. Everything I made sounded terrible.

[andypryce]

Atari and Pro 24.
This made me wonder if or how we got any updates or bug fixes having no internet. I can not remember. But I remember that it just worked

[Psuper]

Lots of love here for the Amiga 500 which is awesome. I loved my Amiga after years of the c64, but Atari was top dog at that time for schools and the few who had computers in the US. When I joined the Airforce and got stationed in the UK in 1989, I was blown away - Amiga was KING in Europe and you couldn't go in any town without some Amiga geeks selling stuff.

I still have my signed copy (by all the devs including Molyneux, who was the friggin MAN at that time) of Syndicate when I visited Bullfrog in Oxford. Still have my Amiga too, but haven't fired it up in ages. And "Workbench" was so damn ahead of its time, Amiga could have easily been the Microsoft of today - Amiga already had the 'toaster' line of editing going in most pro graphics studios, just was short sighted to overtake the consumer.

Also, early DAWS were more about sending those midi notes to your hardware synth, wasn't until much much later it started to reverse.

[Silaris]

A Macintosh SE30 running MasterTracks Pro software for MIDI sequencing. Audio was recorded to an 8-track tape deck (can't remember the model), which was initially replaced by an Alesis ADAT years later and then a Roland VS-880.

The good o'le days.

[imrae]

Tinkered with Cubasis on a G3 iMac. I think it was 400MHz, but PowerPC MHz were "faster" than Intel MHz back then...

Things really took off for me a few years later with Garageband.

[felis]

1st computer - Yamaha CX5M - https://www.msx.org/wiki/Yamaha_CX5M

Then switched to Atari and got Cubase (midi only).

Then switched to a pc, and when Cubase got audio, that was my first pc/daw combo - I don't remember what pc it was though.
PC's were changing quickly and becoming obsolete soon during that time.

[mutantdog]

Amiga 1200 with Octamed Pro

First track i made was called "MC Hammer Competition." You can probably guess what it sounded like.

[Mushy Mushy]

First ever PC was an XT with a 4MB HDD!

First DAW was a Pentium 1 with a god awful Soundblaster and Fruity 2. Great memories though. We’d go out on the Friday and then the next day try to make our own tunes whilst on the most monumental comedowns. Ah, those were the days.

[sqigls]

10GB hard drive!!!! man that thing cost me over 500 bucks alone.

That'll be Auzzzyyyy dollars...
Pretty cheap then>>>

um, at the time not sure. now the AU dollar is total crap, but at times has been worth more than the US dollar.

you're livin in the future dude!
this was 20 years ago.

[voidhead23]

My first proper setup was in 2007 with a MacBook Pro and Logic Express (8, i think?). i blew my graduation money on that and Battery, Absynth and Guitar Rig LE from NI and an M-Audio Firewire 410.

Before that it was a couple years of of pirated crap (most notably Cool Edit Pro) on a Dell something. After i made some music that i thought was somewhat decent i made the plunge of actually paying for stuff.

[jancivil]

first full sequencing I did was with:

Deluxe Music Construction Set

not a DAW, just notation but it did MIDI.

[toonertik]

10GB hard drive!!!! man that thing cost me over 500 bucks alone.

That'll be Auzzzyyyy dollars...
Pretty cheap then>>>

um, at the time not sure. now the AU dollar is total crap, but at times has been worth more than the US dollar.

you're livin in the future dude!
this was 20 years ago.

Yeah, I know... but hey, you know the jibes tween English and Australians
Shall we talk about cricket ..
BTW, I had 5 fantastic years living in Auz

[Tj Shredder]

I started out with an Apple ][ clone with Z 80 card on the motherboard running Turbopascal in CPM... later attached a Gepard computer, a 68000 based machine running Modula II. Created my own algorithmic Midi programs...
My first Mac was a IIci motherboard I had to put into my own box, couldn‘t afford a complete one...
I was the Opcode guy, running first Max (no MSP yet) and later Vision. The first audio came with a SoundDesigner card. The first real DAW was Studio Vision (until Gibson killed it...)
With Max/MSP I stopped using tape style DAWs/sequencers unless for jobs with ProTools...
Bitwig brought me back to DAWs after a failed attempt from Ableton...

[EnGee]

I started a little bit late relatively as I couldn't afford anything about computer music till about 1999 when I got a job in IT field and could save some money

I remember the PC was with Athlon 900 with 128 MB (Can't remember the hard disk) Windows 98 SE (second edition! ) Anyway, I bought a Casio keyboard (CTK something! 670 or 690 maybe!) and a Terratic EWS MT88 (i think its name) which was really an expensive sound card in that time, I also got Emagic Logic 4 (not platinum, just the basic one without ES1). I didn't have any synth though, just General Midi sounds from my Casio keyboard

[ThomasHelzle]

Yeah, Amiga 500 (with memory extension to 1 MB and a second floppy drive) it was.
For better sound than the internal, I later I bought a Roland U-220 expander and a Döpfer LMK3. Together with Bars&Pipes - Heaven

My first PC as in x86 compatible was a 486 40Mhz AMD with 2 MB RAM that I got because a customer of mine couldn't pay my bill and so he gave me his PC. Cool deal at the time. I updated it to a 80 Mhz CPU and unbelievable 16MB of memory (everybody asked me why I would ever need that much RAM) - which was 1600 german Mark at the time...
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 - I still have the disks.
I wanted into graphics so I got a full length 24bit Miro Crystal graphicscard - ISA bus, so if I maxed out the resolution on my 14" glassbulb-monitor I was able to watch the windows being drawn really slowly but in beautiful colours...
And a huge serial Wacom tablet...
And Fractal Design Painter 1.0...
And Photoshop 2.5 (didn't even have layers at the time, it stole that from Fauve Matisse)...

Then later Cool Edit 95, which I bought via Compuserve.
And Cubasis AV (my hate of all things Cubase is still rooted in that time).
And Adobe Premiere 4, probably the most buggy pile of bad code ever written...

LOL funny how that from the distance looks so cosy...

Cheers,

Tom