History edit
The first digital audio workstation was developed by Bob Ingebretsen and Jim Youngberg at Soundstream in the late 1970s, using a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer running a custom software package called "DAP" (for Digital Audio Processor) for digital audio editing and audio effects such as crossfades. A storage oscilloscope that was connected to the minicomputer acted as the audio waveform display. Edits were made by typing in three-letter commands on a separate computer terminal, listening to digital-to-analog converted results on loudspeakers, and using the waveform display on the storage oscillioscope as a reference.
Audio on the system was stored on disk pack drives, with the audio transferred onto the drives from Soundstream's proprietary digital audio tape recorders using a Unibus tape-to-disk interface also of the company's own design. Soundstream also developed a digital-to-analog interface for this system for interfacing to conventional analog tape recorders as well.
In 1981, recording engineer Roger Nichols built a digital audio workstation of his own design, using a S-100 bus-based computer with a Micropolis 8" form factor 32 MB hard disk used for storage of digital audio data. It interfaced digitally to a 3M multi-track digital audio tape recorder in his studio, and was used to edit audio from the recorder. Nichols' system was used during the recording and production of Donald Fagen's 1982 album, The Nightfly.
At the late 1980s, consumer level computers such as the Apple Macintosh or the Commodore Amiga started to have enough power to handle the task of digital audio editing. Macromedia's Soundedit was the first audio editing software to appear for the Macintosh in 1986, but the concept was made popular by a company called Digidesign, who in 1987 introduced one of the first hardware & software packages for the Apple personal computer for editing audio, Sound Tools. The software was called Sound Designer II since it was essentially an update of the sample-editing "Sound Designer" software used with sampling keyboards like the Emulator II and Akai S900. This was the predecessor to the still current Pro Tools system. Many major recording studios finally "went digital" because Digidesign had modelled its Pro Tools software after the traditional method and signal flow present in almost all analog recording devices. At this time most of the DAWs were Apple Mac based (Pro Tools, Studer Dyaxis, Sonic Solutions). Around 1992, the first Windows based DAWs started to emerge from companies such as Soundscape Digital Technology later acquired by Mackie then by SSL, SADiE and Spectral Synthesis. All the systems at this point utilized dedicated hardware for their audio processing.
The first Windows based software-only product was Samplitude Studio, (1993) which already existed in 1992 as an audio editor for "Amiga", in 1994 a company called OSC produced a 4 track editing-recorder app called DECK ($399,95) for Digidesign, employed in The Residents' "Freakshow" LP. Software Audio Workshop (SAW) came in 1994 from IQS and it was able to record, edit and mix 4 tracks of audio. It became heavily used throughout US radio stations.