[bityard]

I can't say much about the early history, but trackers have a unique UI compared to other DAW software. Instead of a staff or piano-roll, the tracker UI looks more like a spreadsheet, with each column being a channel, each row being a step, and each cell containing a note or effect.

This representation meshed well with early demoscene music storage and code, and evolved into its own subculture in the late 80's and early 90's.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker