Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
At 1:45 PM +0100 2/6/05, Per Boysen wrote: > DAW's were originally Mac only. Wrong. The first Digital Audio Workstations were developed as one-off or limited-run systems at research centers such as Bell Labs and various universities during the 1970s and early 1980s. There were no Macs until 1984. The term "workstation" as applied to computer music doesn't seem to have come into vogue until around 1982-83 (at least in my personal experience). Up to that point most computer music was done either in batch systems, using punch cards, or in time-share systems with multiple terminals attached to a central mainframe. The "workstation" concept was based on having a single-user computer with its own storage and audio converters. Some of the first examples I saw were on Sun (UCSD) and Hewlett-Packard (MIT) computers, and later on the NeXT cube with Ariel DSP cards (the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation, or ISPW). >The first DAW available for a Windows based computer was "Session >8", as I recall. Maybe so, maybe not. When was Session 8 for Windows released? WaveFrame came out in 1987. >A "DAW" is multi channel, a opposed to a "sample editor" like cool >edit, peak, sound forge etc. Also wrong. A digital audio workstation is any single-user computer system dedicated to audio work. It doesn't matter how many "tracks" it has or what the particulars of its HW/SW architecture might be. Note that there was nothing about the workstation concept that married it to a multitrack recording/editing paradigm. In fact, most of the early workstations focused more on digital synthesis and processing (though digital recording and editing was part of the mix from at least the mid-1970s). -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://salamandersongs.com http://ill-wind.com