A peek into the past (Added Link)

I thought a few of you might want to take a trip down memory lane. A friend of mine walked into my office yesterday to show me an unsold version Cakewalk 1.0 complete with 5.25 disks. Very cool...
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here's what was needed to run Cakewalk Pro Audio 9:
 
MINIMUM
Windows 95/98: Pentium 200MHz, 64Mb RAM. Windows NT: Pentium 300MHz, 128Mb, Service Pack 5.
 
RECOMMENDED
Windows 95/98: Pentium 300MHz, 128Mb RAM.
 
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec99/articles/cakewalk.htm
 

It was such a pretty puuuurple program wasn't it.b
 

That package has never been licensed...

I don't think you could install it without a computer from that era. One thing, it's rare to find a 3.5 inch floppy drive let alone a 5.25 floppy. 
 
It's cool that my first sequencer Dr T KCS , can still run it on a PC. There's a web site where they have all the old Atari software now as freeware. You need an XP computer, however, to run the Atari emulator STEem. I have an old stemwinder joystick and play Buggy Boy on it. 
I still have all my Atari 3.5 floppies with my seq. all. and sng. files. I never throw out my back ups :)  
http://tamw.atari-users.net/
 
Go to that page and look at the excellent list of 80's software we could only dream of owning all of it back then.,,all free now. You'll even find Cubase which I also owned but didn't like as much as KCS so never used it. 
 http://tamw.atari-users.net/cubase.htm
 
 
 
 
 

 Finale 95 works on W7.  This program probably would as well.

 http://shop.deviceside.com/prod/FC5025
 
 I went to an estate sale last Summer and the person must have been in computer sales.  It was like a museum. There were boxes of those disks and they packaging looked like it was manufactured yesterday.  There were IDE hard drives.  I got a WD500 for $10.  I wish I would have bought the rest of them. My machines still have IDE ports and you can still get IDE enclosures.  There was also those PCI network cards that are not needed anymore.

shawn@trustmedia.tv
I remember switching from Bars & Pipes Pro on my Amiga 4000 to Pro Audio 9 on a 500mhz PC...WOW! Real time sample playback and recording of multiple tracks...it was amazing! -S

Ah, my Amiga 4000 and Bars and Pipes. I think it was just about as good as MIDI ever got. As someone else said regarding another program. GUIs are more modern but the manipulation of the actual data hasn't all hat much.

shawn@trustmedia.tv
I remember switching from Bars & Pipes Pro on my Amiga 4000 to Pro Audio 9 on a 500mhz PC...WOW! Real time sample playback and recording of multiple tracks...it was amazing! -S

Bars and Pipes! Wow what a trip down memory lane. I doubt whether that name has crossed my mind in at least 20 years. 

Ha ha that's too funny as I actually could not get my head around any editing in Piano view for years. I did all my editing in what would be Sonars Event veiw. I too looks at songs by the math of the numbers, 12, 24 , 48 and 96. I think triplets where 8, 16 and 32. It all added up to 96 = a whole note.  
Oh my god did we waist time on that! Calkewalk's Guitar studio forced me to use Piano view editing because the event list was so bad compared to Dr T KCS. It still is. 

SilkTone
Does anyone know of a definitive list of CW products, and the year they were released? Even Wikipedia, which usually has tons of info on stuff like this, only has vague references to different CW products.

I have such a list, which I compiled during a period when my audio interface was broken and my computer was mute for a month. It's not 100% complete and sloppily formatted in a text file, but it includes original list prices, new features, initial and final release dates and links to contemporary reviews. It also correlates the timeline with other DAWs (e.g. Steinberg Pro 16 MIDI sequencer predates Cakewalk by 4 years).
 
It's much too long to paste into a forum post, but here's a small synopsis:
 
1987: Greg Hendershot writes a MIDI sequencer
1988: Cakewalk for DOS 1.0
1992: Cakewalk Professional for Windows
1995: Cakewalk Pro Audio
1996: Pro Audio 3
1997: Pro Audio 6 
1998: Pro Audio 7 - support for DirectX plugins
1998: Pro Audio 8 - automation, MIDI plugins
1999: Pro Audio 9 - Session Drummer, stereo tracks
2001: SONAR 1 - first DAW to combine MIDI and audio
2002: SONAR 2 - adds Rewire and ASIO support
2003: SONAR 3 - first VST support (wrapper)
2004: SONAR 4 - freeze function, track folders, TTS-1, list price $959
2005: SONAR 5 - 64-bit engine, V-Vocal
2006: SONAR 6 - AudioSnap, ACT, first native VST support
2007: SONAR 7 - Sidechaining, Z3ta+, step sequencer
2008: SONAR 8 - first release under Roland
2009: SONAR 8.5 - lots of new plugins
 
 
 
 

bitflipper
I have such a list, which I compiled during a period when my audio interface was broken and my computer was mute for a month. It's not 100% complete and sloppily formatted in a text file, but it includes original list prices, new features, initial and final release dates and links to contemporary reviews. It also correlates the timeline with other DAWs (e.g. Steinberg Pro 16 MIDI sequencer predates Cakewalk by 4 years).
 
It's much too long to paste into a forum post, but here's a small synopsis:
 
1987: Greg Hendershot writes a MIDI sequencer
1988: Cakewalk for DOS 1.0
1992: Cakewalk Professional for Windows
1995: Cakewalk Pro Audio
1996: Pro Audio 3
1997: Pro Audio 6 
1998: Pro Audio 7 - support for DirectX plugins
1998: Pro Audio 8 - automation, MIDI plugins
1999: Pro Audio 9 - Session Drummer, stereo tracks
2001: SONAR 1 - first DAW to combine MIDI and audio
2002: SONAR 2 - adds Rewire and ASIO support
2003: SONAR 3 - first VST support (wrapper)
2004: SONAR 4 - freeze function, track folders, TTS-1, list price $959
2005: SONAR 5 - 64-bit engine, V-Vocal
2006: SONAR 6 - AudioSnap, ACT, first native VST support
2007: SONAR 7 - Sidechaining, Z3ta+, step sequencer
2008: SONAR 8 - first release under Roland
2009: SONAR 8.5 - lots of new plugins

Wow, that's awesome. So I started using CW sometime between 1988 to 1992. That's ~25 years. Holy crap!
 
I still remember when Pro Audio came out. Some people were complaining about adding audio into the product. Something to the effect that it would ruin the sequencer or something. IIRC it had 4 audio tracks initially.

This thread takes me back.

My first computer sequencer proper was Music-X on an Amiga A1200 with an upgraded 68030 cpu, extra RAM (which cost a relative fortune back then), floating point unit and factory internal hard drive. The A1200 and A4000 could trample over DOS/Windows 3 PCs back then. It took quite a while for PC operating systems to catch up with Amiga OS 4's effortless multi-tasking and graphics ability.

The A1200 still works, or it did about a year ago when I plugged it in to an old television out of curiosity. Music-X was MIDI only, I tracked into a decent 4 track cassette portastudio and mixed down first onto hi-fi VCR (because we had one and it was way better than cassette), later DAT.

And yes, the piano roll editor was pretty much like Sonar's current one in terms of the basic concept. Not surprising really, it's an approach that works very well. Rather like written or printed staff notation hasn't needed a major "upgrade" in a couple of centuries or more. Unlike Sonar's staff editor.....

I never really got on with OctaMED, there was something about the sample trackers and the way my mind works that never quite synced for some reason. Could be why I don't like Live now, other than using the lite version to run MIDI sequences to synths live once in a while.