DAW
Digital audio workstation — the program where music is recorded, edited, mixed and mastered, and which replaced both the tape machine and the mixing desk.
It has two family trees. One is MIDI sequencers such as Cubase, born in 1989 on the Atari ST thanks to its built-in MIDI ports. The other is hard-disk recording, where Digidesign's Pro Tools, launched in 1991, became the studio standard. The branches merged during the 1990s, and today Cubase, Logic, Ableton Live, FL Studio and Reaper do roughly the same job with different opinions on where you should click.
At the core sits an audio engine mixing tracks in real time inside a buffer window of a few milliseconds, plus a plugin format such as VST for effects and instruments. On Windows the audio reaches the hardware through ASIO, because the system's regular audio path is too slow to play live through.