Mine was like the meme; sound recorder and a beige stick microphone put up to an old used Fender practice amp, and a no-name brand guitar from the pawn shop. We’ve come a long way.
I’ll match you and raise:
We could rock the fuck out!
Oh 100% the same thing as yours. I still don’t have a real mic like 20+ years later…
Impulse Tracker on a 486 PC. As raw as music production gets.
Windows Sound Recorder was an intermediate step for me, when I left my modest gear behind and was basically homeless. All I had access to was a library computer and the crappy headphones they had and no microphone, but I really wanted to create SOMETHING. I’m proud that I could make some really simple, lo-fi, ambient stuff with just a paperclip in the mic jack and the wide array of processing options that WSR has (adjust volume, add echo). It’s such an uphill-both-ways kind of story, though.
You got any stuff floating around? I’m curious about it.
Ardour with vitalium
Build in aux port
Seaboard midi Controller
Teufel boomster and/or marshal monitor II as monitorLMMS and a cheap MIDI keyboard
Now it’s FL Studio, the same MIDI keyboard, a guitar I already had but got out of storage and only sorta know how to play, and a Rocksmith Real Tone Cable
LMMS gang! I also graduated to FL, but LMMS will always have a place in my heart as my first proper DAW.
Same with the top picture, but with a clip-on mic. Then I had a pair of those old classic bookshelf speakers that picked up signal interference like your phone when a text is arriving. I also recorded vocal layers by playing a recorded track on those speakers and singing over it by placing the mic close by.
Jeskola Buzz Tracker. Making tracks in a vertical midi step sequencer with no mixer was wild AF.
IIRC it came with an awesome drum kit called PSI Drums and a set of proprietary plugins (non VST) which included several cool synths abd Whitenoise Stereodist - the most brutal distortion I’ve ever heard, surpassing Ohmicide, Coldfire and Rift in its ability to turn things into aggressive digital terrain.
Migrated to Fruity Loops pretty soon thereafter