DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation, which is the computer setup - the hardware & software combination- used for audio tasks, whether it's music composition, audio editing & restoration or mastering. Nowadays the acronym DAW tends to mean the main music software you use for audio & midi sequencing & song creation.

The history of the DAW is a gradual evolvement. The MIDI technology standard was released in 1982/1983. In 1984 Roland released their MPU-401 MIDI interface standard, initially as a breakout box, but soon after in computer card format. The MPU-401 allowed computers to add MIDI ports.

These technologies allowed the creation of the first computer MIDI sequencers starting in the mid 1980's hosted on Commodore, Atari & early Mackintosh & Windows machines. At the same time in parallel, digital Audio recording & editing softwares were developing, starting with simple stereo editors, moving on to 4-track editors and eventually getting to full multitrack capability in the same way all computing devices upgrade in steps - 4 tracks, 8 tracks, 16 tracks, 32 tracks, 64 tracks 128 tracks etc by doubling the available audio track processing with each step.

The 1990's saw the start of MIDI & audio being combined to give us the first forms of the softwares we are all now familiar with: MIDI & audio recording tracks living side by side in the same program, allowing the user to create Midi & audio compositions in the same arrangement working area.

The final part of the story is the introduction and takeover of plugin technology for effects and then instruments which has matured over the last 20 years to bring us to the point we are now. Here's a timeline of key softwares along the journey to the DAW standard we have today:

DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation, which is the computer setup - the hardware & software combination- used for audio tasks whether it's music composition, audio editing & restoration or mastering, however nowadays the word DAW tends to mean the main music software you use for audio & midi sequencing & song creation.

All DAW softwares nowadays are basically sequencers for composing audio & MIDI parts together, all in sync, within a single unified composition software. Early DAW softwares such as Cubase Audio & Cakewalk only offered digital audio recording & external MIDI hardware sequencing & the whole lot was then mixed in the traditional way using an external mixing desk, but software plugin instruments & effects came along, born out of the Steinberg VST technology, and nowadays most people use software instruments running in plugin format inside the DAW software rather than traditional hardware MIDI synths, samplers and drum machines and external hardware effect processors.

Here's the main DAW softwares used today in no particular order.

Realtime software plugin effects & audio processors such as equalisers, compressors, delays & reverbs etc started life in DAW's running off NuBus & PCI accelerator cards housing DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chips which could handle the processing of audio in realtime. This technology introduced the Digidesign Pro Tools TDM plugin format which ruled supreme for several years.

in the late 1990's more advanced versions of the humble Creative Labs Soundblaster & Yamaha's SW1000XG audio cards could run DSP effects as well as handling audio in/out duties, but companies like TC Electronics & Universal Audio started to deliver their own dedicated DSP devices with the TC Electronics' PowerCore and Universal Audio's UAD cards respectively. These cards didn't handle audio in/out but were entirely dedicated to handling high computing power DSP FX processing and they could be integrated into all the popular DAW softwares.

So at first, realtime FX (which processed the audio streams in realtime rather than having to render/bounce an 'effected' new bit of audio) were only available via DSP add-on cards, but that all changed once computers started to get enough CPU power to start to handle these tasks themselves - When the computer CPU does all the processing for plugin FX & Instruments this is known as 'Native Proccessing'.

Native plugin processing started to become a reality with Steinbergs VST technology released in 1996 & then updated in 1999 to add MIDI which was the start of VST Instruments (VSTi). At around the same time Emagic started to offer their own Native plugins for Logic & the Native hosted plugin was now a firm reality available to most users who could afford a decently powerful Windows or Mac machine.

When Steinberg introduced the open source Cubase VST protocol in 1996, Waves had a selection of plugins ready to go for it's release & this is why Waves became such a big player in the Plugin scene, going on from there to consolidate their position in the early days as one of the first big effect plugin purveyors in VST format for DAWs

So in the mid to late 1990's we started to see 'Native' plugins powered by the host computer's CPU, but for real power you still needed a DSP card solution, so in the latter half of the 1990's & on into the first half of the 2000's, 'Native' & DSP plugin use overlapped until the eventual takeover of Native processing once multi-core computers appeared & started to get powerful enough to handle the extra workload of processing multiple plugin FX, plugin Instruments & audio playback all together.
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Dedicated DSP accelerator cards can only run plugins from the same company that makes the card, they can't run 3rd party plugins, so the quality of the plugin FX available for the platform determined the popularity of the brand. Universal Audio became very big in the plugin market by virtue of the fact their UAD DSP cards offered plugin emulations of classic studio hardware effects that the company already owned the rights to, such as the Teletronix LA2A compressor & the Universal Audio 1176 compressor, all brands owned by Universal Audio or being subsidiaries of the company. The DSP card era established Universal Audio as one of the biggest for emulations of classic hardware & still today UA offers plugin only for it's UAD DSP systems with various DSP hardware 'host' units available which connect to your Computer via USB 3/C, Thunderbolt or in PCIe card form.
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This was the era that towards it's end-days also gave us products like the Emu 1820m (which offered DSP hosted FX on it's PCI connecting breakout box (coming out of the Creative Labs earlier Soundblaster DSP tech after Creative purchased E-mu) and the Focusrite Liquidmix, a firewire external DSP device which offered emulations of classic Eq's and compressors which could process audio in realtime inside your DAW. .

As the 2000's rolled on multi-core x86 CPU's from Intel & ADM combined with faster & faster bus & ram speeds meant the end for DSP card based plugins in all but the most hi-end setups. Computers eventually reached the point of having enough processing power to not only handle the multiple streams of audio but multiple fx processing in realtime as well. Since the early to mid 2000's therefore it's been host-based 'Native' processing all the way for the vast majority of users, which basically means that pretty much all plugins are available from all companies for all DAWs rather than being dedicated to a fixed DSP card from a particular manufacturer.

Native hosted Software instruments started to become reality with the 1999 introduction of Steinberg's VST 2 technology which added MIDI to it's oroginal VST plugin format. Now plugins could recieve & send MIDI & this started the Native plugin Instrument revolution.

The early days of VSTi instruments was a bit hit & miss tbh, because while the technology did allow a software instrument to generate sound via MIDI, playing those early instruments in realtime was only possible with a very low latency audio interface (soundcard) which would allow the instrument to almost instantly output a sound upon recieving a MIDI note, & soundcards & drivers hadn't really caught up at this point.

At the same time Steinberg introduced it's VST V1 protocol in 1996/1997 they also introduced another technology called ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output). ASIO was a driver technology that bypassed the Windows operating system software layers and allowed the host software to address the soundcards Kernel directly. By shortening the route from host software to the aoundcard this reduced latency. This was the start of low latency audio interfaces which at first were in soundcard form.

The problem however in the late 1990's was that we were still in the era of quite primative older soundcards like the Soundblaster Live, while higher-end users using the recent digital audio multitracks on Windows were using cards like the Turtle Beach Tahiti & Digital Audio Labs Card-D. none of which had fast ASIO drivers. The ASIO4All project created ASIO drivers for the humble soundblaster, but things didn't really come together until the new generation of soundcards with fast ASIO drivers hit the market.

in 1997 when Steinberg dropped the VST & ASIO technology, Emagic released their own plugin & driver format for Logic products only. Emagic's audio protocol was called EASI (Emagic Audio Streaming Interface) driver technology which was similar to ASIO, available for any developers to write drivers for their products, but after some initiail EASI offerings most companies dropped EASI in favour of ASIO.

So in 1997 you could get the Emagic branded Audiowerk-8 soundcard. Before the Audiowerk 8 the only way to get seperate outputs from Logic Audio was using pro-Tools hardware & DSP plugins which it was still compatible with until Logic Audio v3.0 which brought in Native plugins.

Another early 'first' soundcard was oddly from Korg via their 1212 PCI card which they made available seperately from their SoundLInk digital system in 1996.

These were examples of the new wave of early PCI cards which offered compatibility with the new EASI (Emagic) or ASIO (Steinberg) driver technologies.

The real revolution however started in 1999 with the Event series of soundcard. The Event Gina, Darla & Layla soundcards were PCI based and featured a 24bit Motoroal DSP chip bypassing the requirement for DMA to process audio streams from the DAW. Finally we could get a soundcard which would work in any DAW (Cubase, Logic, Cakewalk, Soundforge, etc) with fast ASIO drivers and this was the moment from which realtime playable software VST intruments started to become a RELIABLE reaility.

Software synths have come a long way from the early stand-alone days, and through the early iterations of plugin protocol. Today with hugely powerful computers they offer almost unlimited power & every type of synthesis know to man. Further to this, many of the big modern software synths behave mpre like workstation synths of the hardware days & include everything required in the way of sequencing, arpeggiators & fx to the extent that you can almost create the entire compisition using the one synth and norhing else required.

Further to this we've seen the rise of the add-on sound-pack, much the same way as games have evolved to be so much about selling the DLC and Loot-Boxes. Modern big-hitting mega-synths like NEXUS & SERUM offer a huge selection of download sound preset packs & this is a growing trend which in some ways is not bad at all because it creates openings for dedicated & skilled sound designers to create content for sale by the synth manufacturer or through 3rd party vendors. In other ways it further democratises dance-music making with new users having easy access to sounds of every genre many of which come with sequences designed to work with the sound right out of the box.

Here's the current big hitters in software synths particularly orientated to making dance music productions, film score and more.

Audio mastering is a dark art, best left to professionals, and when it comes to vinyl mastering that's a whole other ball-game you can't even begin.to do at home. But once you've got your mixed song finished there's ways the average user can enhance those stereo master song files to give them more gloss & impact as well as fixing them with the best levels for iTunes, Spotify and other streaming services. Further to this, due to the takeover of streaming services in recenty years, CD sales are not what they once were, but you may still want to master for CD which involves not only the audio mastering part - modifying the master file with things like Eq & Compression/Limiting etc - but alsp preparing the tracks in the correct order as a CD 'Red Book' master file which can be used at a CD plant to duplicate your CD's in large batches or to burn your own 'Red Book' standard CD's at home with a CD Burner. (a 'Red Book' CD master plays in an audio CD player & can have extras like song titles, ID codes etc)

Most of those tasks can be done at home to a reasonable extent by the typical end user & to do that you need a software mastering suite or you can even beef up and add gloss to yur track with a simple plugin.
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Here's a selection of popular Mastering softwares & plugins of the type used in home studio setups & beyond.