I was first introduced to Digidesign in the late 1980s with Sound Designer.
If my memory serves me well, it cost around £6,000 for the software and hardware and an additional £7,000 for the Mac IIcx to run it - it was a stereo audio editor! Check out the great line in the copy ‘with these features, compare Sound Tools to any audio editing system, you’ll find one difference. Price’.
You might think this was marketing hype, but the next closest thing was an AMS Audiofile for around £60,000.
Then check out this advert from 1992 when we got 4 tracks of audio with version II.
This kind of puts it all into perspective when you think what £13,000 (around $20,000) would buy you today.