Cakewalk
The most stubborn DAW in the Windows world – a 1987 MIDI sequencer that has outlived four owners and one shutdown.
Twelve Tone Systems of Boston released Cakewalk as a MIDI sequencer for MS-DOS in 1987, and the company eventually took the product's name. Where Steinberg's and Emagic's software grew up on the Atari and the Mac, Cakewalk was the PC's own. It built its effects on Microsoft's DirectX plug-ins rather than VST, and the flagship was renamed SONAR in 2001.
Roland bought a majority stake in 2008, Gibson took over in 2013 and pulled the plug on development in November 2017. Singapore-based BandLab bought the remains in 2018 and gave the program away as Cakewalk by BandLab – an unusual afterlife for a commercial DAW. A few years later it went back to being paid software under the old Sonar name, which left some users rather less cheerful than they had been during the free years.