Flashback: my first synths and how I learned synthesis

It was 1999 when I first encountered audio software on an Amiga computer that belonged to my cousin. You were about Tracker programs: ProTracker and DigiBooster. It was my cousin who infected me with his passion for creating music and working with computers.
Soon after, I became the owner of a PC myself. It was some Pentium II 266MHz if I'm not mistaken. It was so powerful that I had to watch DivX in a reduced 4x4cm window to avoid the freeze-frame effect.
A friend downloaded FruityLoops 2 Demo from the Internet for me, and then it started ... Apart from FruityLoops, I also got a few other programs:

On these synthesizers, I learned subtractive synthesis by trial-error - the best way to learn, in my opinion. There were no tutorials on Youtube then, and I only gathered information from the music magazine Estrada and Studio, which mainly had instrument tests. It was from them that I found out what the oscillator, LFO or envelope really is.

I had no one to explain to me what each of these parameters is for. I had to find everything myself. And guess what? I have never regretted it. Learning to synthesize was the best of times: total freedom without habits. The results were terrible, but the fun was priceless.

Those were amazing times. SimSynth that wasn't even running in real-time. Many people would bounce off him today because to hear the sound, you had to change the parameters, click Play, and only then the sound was generated and played. Total experiment! Its best advantage was the ability to import the generated files into FruityLoops.

If I remember correctly, the TS-404 worked in real-time, and FruityLoops also had it built into the program.

DrumSynth was a completely different beast. It used additive synthesis to generate drum sounds (I just read about it myself). The best fun was with envelopes that (I think) could be edited directly in the window.

At that time, my greatest desire was to get the Novation A-Station. It was a dream that never came true, and I had to wait many more years before I had the first hardware synthesizer.

At the same time, the Techno Party magazine was released, which, in addition to music, also contained demos of music-making software.

These are the CD's they released: https://www.discogs.com/label/33022-Techno-Party

It was thanks to Techno Party that I had the opportunity to meet two more synthesizers:

Reality - which had powerful possibilities (several types of synthesis) that far exceeded me and my knowledge at the time.