My "avatar" shows my first Cakewalk.
For computer music, I started with a Commodore C=128 and the "Incredible Musical Keyboard" which included Ryo Kawasaki's "Kawasaki Synthesizer. It did not have MIDI or Audio recording.
When I got to MS-DOS I needed to buy a new keyboard - one that worked with the PC. I went shopping and at Carlgrens Keyboards Plus I found a little FM Synth with a MPU-401 clone MIDI adapter. The little synth wasn't much more than a toy, but the MIDI adapter was the real deal. It came with Cakewalk 2.0 (for MS-DOS). That's the pile of documentation and disks in my avatar.
In the mid 1990's I upgraded to Cakewalk 5.0 (still for MS-DOS) - but now it supported ANY MIDI adapter you could find on a PC - or at least nearly any. It did support the MIDI port on my Sound Blaster card, so that was good enough for me. I had a better keyboard by then, too, not so much a toy.
Next I went through Cakewalk Express version 8, Cakewalk Music Creator, Cakewalk Home Studio 2002, Cakewalk SONAR Home Studio 7 XL, SONAR X1 Studio, Music Creator 6 Touch (I had a touch screen laptop at that time), SONAR X3 Studio, and finally SONAR Platinum.
The story would have ended there, but now I have Cakewalk by BandLab, so the story continues.
