Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which I sometimes put on just to hear the intro). I even plugged the midi cables into our keyboard once or twice.
That said, have their ever been less satisfying keys in all computing history than those mushy function keys?
Same here, some of my earliest memories were of interacting with the GEM desktop on one of these when my Dad wasn't looking so that I could load up robocop :P then he caught me and was like "how did you figure out how to do that".
Silly little things like the bee are now permanently etched in my mind.
Keyboard and machine in one, was also very nice. Currently, in the same genre, there are raspberry pi keyboards.
I remember running around at brattaccas and being frustrated each time it crashed when i found all evidence envelopes...
But what i loved most was GFA basic, a basic that was fast enough to compete with C, but much more convenient to use.
Did I hear that you're looking for an emulator? I recommend Hatari [0] if you want to run games and demos. You'll likely need a TOS ROM image [1]; Hatari comes with EmuTOS, which doesn't work with a lot of games that make assumptions about the memory layout of internal OS structures and the like.
If you want to run well written GEM applications then I recommend ARAnyM [2], which is a lot faster, due to not attempting to do a cycle-accurate emulation of all the original hardware.
And if you have any issues with the above, there are still lots of people hanging out in Atari-Forum that might be able to help [3].
Hey. Thanks so much. Really for the links and the guidance on how I might want to navigate it.
Help like this makes a passing wish but little time a lot more doable.
I know some HNers don’t like unprovoked longer form content but I have always been appreciative of it like this and try to do it myself cuz you never know who it might reach passively.
It was as capable or more capable than the original Macintosh gui.
If Atari had broken through in North America like they had in Europe as business machines tech adoption would have progressed quickly.
I was randomly lucky that my Canadian 7th grade computer lab was full of them, when everyone else was in the stone ages on IBM XTs. There was a Original Mac lab too and those were archaic in comparison.
The ZX Spectrum keyboard was a thing of wonder, and probably single-handedly responsible for me getting into programming just because of the keyword labels. I'm sure if I revisited it today I'd find it annoying but I don't remember it that way.
My brother and I got a 1040ST in 1987 while we were still developing 8-bit games, because the PDS, a z80 game development tool, had been developed for PC and for ST, but not Amiga, and the PCs were/felt sort of clunky and expensive. It was a beautiful machine that could do music, desktop publishing and solid tools, and gave us a much wider understanding of what computers could do besides games.
A couple years later we bought an extension board for it with a NEC V20 that allowed it to function as a CGA-equipped MSDOS PC, and that's how we got started developing for the PC.
It's odd that two game developers and demosceners from late 80s to mid-90s never owned an Amiga. :)
People didn't see it at the time, but the Atari ST was the first signal of the End of the Platform Computer.
On paper, this should have been perfect: it was a maximally cost-reduced 68k board with capabilities that met or exceeded everything on the market. It was faster than a Mac Plus or PC/AT and 3x cheaper than either, it had an EGA level framebuffer (though the color monitor was still a TV tube). I had one of these and loved it, and was sure it was the best computer in the world.
But it tanked, and it tanked because it didn't run Lotus 1-2-3, or Excel, or Netware, and you couldn't buy a VGA or ethernet card for it out of the back of Byte magazine.
Computers in 1984 were still small enough that you could just throw a good/cheap computer (c.f. the C64) with junk software (c.f. the C64) at the market and have the software vendors figure out everything by writing to the bare metal.
Computers in 1986 needed frameworks and commonality and ecosystems (above this level, note that diskless Sun 3's with 4.2BSD and NFS were reaching market at this moment too). And that meant just shipping something cheaper wasn't enough any more.
Not sure what you're defining platform computer, but yeah, I think you're right. Tramiel Sr. also never understood the concept of an evolving platform with forward compatibility. Each of the Commodore home computers under his watch were bespoke and unique and not really expandable.
Operating system at both Atari and Commodore was treated as an afterthought and didn't get ongoing development. At Atari they put very little investment into the operating system after the original launch, and not much into the hardware either.
Not until his sons took over. Under them, Atari did finally make moves in the early 90s to try to build a large growable ecosystem on what was started and to diversify but it was too late.
An Atari 1040ST i combination with a sampler, like Akai S-900 or Roland W-30, and a synth with keybs, was a gret combo back then. As the first computer with built in midi-interface, it became very popular with musicians.
Yes. The only important inventions since the 1980'ies in music technology is synthesizer emulators and autotune. Most of the techno music that has become popular lately, could easily be made with vintage gear from the 1980'ies.
"Some 3rd parties produced boards that could contain a Blitter chip, but I’m not aware of anyone directly adding one to the board."
My 520ST was upgraded with 2.5MB of RAM and an added blitter chip, so it did happen. I still have the computer and it was still working the last time I powered it up a few years ago.
There was no FPU for the 68000. This was supported by the 68010, which was not present in any Atari computers. Are you sure he didn't add it for the Falcon, which did have a slot for an FPU.
I did my school work experience for Atari in Slough Uk which must have been in about 1988. I’m not sure what the office I worked in actually did, I think possibly orders/ dispatch, but they left me largely to my own devices to play around with an ST, which I would regularly brick by inadvertently deleting some essential system file or other, then work through my lunch break in a cold sweat to fix it before anyone found out.
In retrospect I suspect that they knew exactly what was going on and left me to it- which was probably the most valuable experience I could have had. If you’re out there, thanks:)
When the 2 week stint was up I transferred to work in goods out for a holiday job and bought a 1040 ST with the proceeds. They were awesome machines at the time.
I read the headline and thought, "Maybe the 1040ST is something like the IRS's income tax form 1040EZ, i.e. a variation on the standard US income tax form 1040. How exciting!"
Nope. If you filled one of these and sent it to the IRS, they would not be happy.
In 1986 I was given the greenlight by my parents to get some $$ from them to upgrade off my VIC-20 and onto a more real computer.
I had my heart set on a Commodore 128. 80 columns! Z-80 mode! 128kB of RAM. I fantasized about an Amiga. But... didn't fit in the budget. I came from a working class family without a tonne of discretionary spending to toss around on stuff like that.
Then I read about the Atari ST, and I was like.. what? I can get 512kB of RAM, an 8mhz 32-bit 68000, internal 3.5" floppy, built-in GUI, and a beautiful flicker free monochrome monitor for the same price as a C128+Monitor+floppy? Was half the price of the equivalent Amiga setup at the time, too.
Great machines. I had a second-hand 520STfm, but upgraded the RAM to 1MB and the floppy to 720k so it was basically a 1040ST. Imagine coming from a 1mhz 5kB VIC-20 to that. What a dream it was to turn it on the first time!
The ST was an incredible value. People who try to compare it unfavourably to the Amiga aren't going back and looking at price sheets from the mid-80s. Spec for spec, there was no competition to the "rock bottom price" of the ST and it remained an absolutely superb productivity machine (but just a meh gaming machine really). The monochrome monitor Atari provided was stellar for its time.
Commodore evened it up a bit when they launched the A500 at a more reasonable price. But still had the problem with the interlaced monitor situation. Fixable, but cost $$.
I beat the crap out of my ST and used it right through til late 92, when I was able to get a 486 50mhz and run early Linux on.
I grew up on a 1040ST that was -- according to the previous owner who used it to make music -- upgraded with 4 MB of RAM and two mysterious switches on the back that controlled... something during boot, but I don't remember what. Was it common to modify them these ways? I was too young to understand much of it beyond the amazingness that it allowed me to play video games and make graphic designs.
Basically, grounding a pin of the external floppy drive connector (if memory serves) would make the ST read the OTHER side of the single-sided floppy disk of the INTERNAL drive.
This is because some floppies were formatted in single-side mode, and as a result using half of the maximum possible space. Think B-side of vinyl disks, literally.
The switch let you use the other side, provided you formatted it (and beware of the switch position to not mess up at formatting time…)
Many commercial softwares (incl. games) were using that single-side mode for backward compatibility reasons: I believe an early version of the ST serie was using an internal floppy drive only capable of single-sided usage. Hence the legacy.
My switch was really a simple switch I had around, combined with an hairpin directly plugged into the connector.
Sadly, my 1040STf was one of the very early ones that had a single-sided drive, and the replacement drive I ended up with to be able to use double-sided disks never properly fitted inside the case, so the 1040ST had to spend it's life with half of the case removed.
My 1040ST was an earlier one. Not sure if it was a Rev D motherboard but it did have the 1mb of RAM along the front, under the keyboard.
Atari wanted quite a lot of money for their external 3.5" floppy drive (so that you'd have two - one for your compiler and one for the source/target files). There was a magazine article about how to create a cable (the ST used a DIN connector for the 2nd floppy) so that a Radio Shack 3.5" drive could be used, and it worked fine.
The really annoying part was their hard drive expansion port was proprietary (19 pin D-Sub connector), and wasn't SCSI. That really limited the available choices for mass storage.
The proprietary port was actually SCSI in a non-standard format. There were readily-available conversion boards. I had a self-build external hard drive case with a (20 MB?) SCSI hard drive that let me boot up my ST to MiNT and run the GNU development tools. So close to Unix.
I have very fond memories of my 1040ST — I bought one as soon as I got to college, and the “hi-res” screen made it perfect for writing papers and (more importantly for me) logging into the BSD VAXen from the dorms.
Years after I got a 486 and stopped using my ST I often continued to use it as a dumb terminal hooked up to my 486 which was running Linux via null-modem cable. I did that right up til about 1995.
Atari was very smart building a VT52 mode into the ST, and the mono hi-res monitor was great.
As for "there seem to be quite a few different Atari 1040ST board designs" noted in the article. There is actually a huge number of different board layouts. Look at the entries for "STF" or "STFM" in this overview: https://temlib.org/AtariForumWiki/index.php/Atari_ST_motherb....
As for why Atari redesigned the board so many times: no idea.
That and it ran at 640x400, so more screen real estate.
So people would use the Macintosh emulators on them (piece of hardware that plugged in the Mac ROMs and some floppy adapter stuff) and get a machine far cheaper than (and superior to) a standard Mac of the time. Biggest problem was getting the ROMs.
If I recall the products were SpectreGCR & Magic Sac.
Hrm. Had no problem with the ROMs at all. They came integrated into the cracked version which also eliminated the need for hardware. Just two floppies. Made the rounds in schoolyards at the time ;->
Interesting. I hadn't heard of anybody running without the cartridge before. I surely would have tried this :-)
Without the hardware you wouldn't have been able to read Macintosh floppies (SpectreGCR included some hardware to adapt the frequencies etc on the floppy drive to be able to read Mac floppies), and you'd have to give up a bunch of RAM, no?
Uhm yes, there was that. But in the circles where that crack made the rounds, there were sources which had that hardware, converted and distributed anything which was available as normal floppies :-)
Which really wasn't that much, at the time. But very impressive nonetheless. Mac Write, Paint, Draw, few DTP which I can't remember anymore, Hypercard, few gadgets and tools, few games, and ...errrm... Virtual Valerie...
Was even more fun with a HDD, no more DJing floppies!
I've heard people say Mac emulators on the Amiga were faster than a real Mac at the same clock rate, apparently something to do with the graphics being drawn faster. Perhaps it was the hardware blitter making moving pixels around faster than the software blitter, but I've never seen actual benchmarks.
Good memories. This was my first computer. It was pretty good for games - Kings Quest, Space Quest, Golf, etc. I learned Basic on it and it even ran a very early Word Perfect - across 5 floppies that you had to swap for different functionality. I even had a 1200 baud external Hayes modem to connect to the few local BBS's that existed.
I have fond memories of my Atari 1040ST days, though not quite as fond as my 8-bit days. My use of the ST was at university for writing essays and playing Megaroids or Balance of Power. I guess that makes since I only had the Basic and Asteroids cartridges for my 8-bit Atari for almost a year.
Other than that, this was my first computer that could actually run compilers on, mostly the Megamax C compiler, or try alternate operating systems.
One thing that would have been cool would be the "Magic Sac" cartridge, that with Mac ROMs added would give you a 'Mac' with 1MB ram, 8MHz cpu, and 640 instead of 512 pixels across which is huge improvement in text layout for a letter sized page. At the same time, I liked having a less "liked by general folks" computer writing many fun but useless programs for GEM.
You had empty slots? Lucky you! I soldered mine on top of the existing ones, with the exception of a few pins, which had to be wirewrapped to some other chip.
A fantastic machine, could have been so much more though:
TBH I think bigger impacts would have come from a few tweaks to the ST hardware:
Autocad started life on the ST with the Cyber series of products - including a full expansion port as the cartridge port would allow for high-colour videocards, which the lack of forced them to migrate to other platforms. Similarly for DTP which was huge on the ST at launch.
The AMY chip was pulled at the last minute, but having an 8 channel stereo synth capable of mp3-style playback, alongside a DMA channel (1bit PWM on the DMA chip) would have changed the face of computer audio for 15 years. Even putting stereo output for the YM, and the 1bit PWM on the DMA chip would have been enough to raise the sound bar at the time (vs c64).
Unifying the system clocks like the STE would have allowed the ST to genlock, which together with the expansion port, stereo and midi ports, might have tempted Newtek to do an AV workstation ie. Move professional video production to the platform.
Moving TOS to accommodate large rom sizes could also have changed things, in that MINT (and multitos) were available before linux, and being POSIX compatible (bash, rpm, multiuser etc), it would be similar to having OSX in rom in 1991.
Writing network drivers for the midi ports into TOS would have been beneficial for small businesses, with support for 16 networked machines, and fostered much more collaborative software like lotus notes.
The ST can actually support 7 button joy pads through use of impossible combinations eg. Left+right simultaneously as a fire button. Had Atari sold joypads from launch, that would have benefitted the Amiga as well (it can support even more stuff).
Including the blitter socket as standard in every ST would have allowed Atari to use the T212 transputer instead of the blitter chip in 1987 (the blitter was only available then). In terms of raw power that is roughly equivalent to having a SuperFX2 chip in 1987, but it would potentially change GPU architecture completely as the next generation (T414 in a 32bit) machine would be able to cluster the coprocessors similar to Intel's Xeon Phi, but better.
The ST can do 4pix hardware scrolling and overscan by abusing the shifter (https://youtu.be/hpUbWZWTOiw), there wasn't enough documentation to discover that quickly though. The main thing lacking throughout the ST's and Amiga's life was support of the platform- ship the hardware, make as much money as you can and move on to the next platform, hence lack of development of TOS, no SDK, OCS lasting Commodore until 92. PCs had a much easier time taking over the space thanks to this.
I think, of all the computer companies, the amount of engineering talent that went through Atari Corp was unmatched (ST, EST, ATW, Portfolio, Atari book, CDAR604, TT, Falcon, Lynx, Jaguar, JagVR). I can never understand how it all came to nothing.
It does seem to me that Atari did very well with the use of COTS hardware and software to get a usable machine out at such a low price. It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping.
But it did need both a lot more upgrades and expansions as time went on, as you point out, correctly IMHO. Secondly, I think Atari should have adopted PC standards as they appeared and settled: PS/2 ports, VGA and SVGA monitors and display modes, Baby AT motherboards, SIMM slots, IDE connectors, ISA slots and so on. Apple successfully adopted a lot of this stuff, so classic Macs had standard RAM slots, and the lower-end ones had IDE drives, and so on.
Things like PCI (1992), ATX motherboards and USB (1995) came along too late.
Agreed. The Falcon started down this route with IDE, SCSI2, localtalk, chunky VGA (props to Richard Miller), but Atari cheaped out as they had already decided to leave the computer market and were really just clearing stock.
TOS/GEM was so very basic that enterprising 3rd party developers were able to extend it from a single-tasking OS to a complete multitasking one, over time, without totally losing compatibility.
(Yes, yes, before any Amiga owners "Well actually..." me: we know, AmigaOS had that built in... But with interprocess communications designed for a single flat shared memory space, that meant that it could't be extended to support 68030+ memory management without breaking compatibility.)
The ST had the potential to really grow as a platform, just as Atari gave up on it. The TT 030, Falcon and ATW (AKA Abaq) were amazing machines with great potential, but it went unrealised.
Oddly enough, the relatively humble Sinclair QL, which was by Sinclair standards a flop, went on to inspire both hardware compatibles (ICL One Per Desk, Merlin Tonto, Telecom Australia ComputerPhone), motherboard upgrades (Gold Card, Aurora), and up-specced clones (CST Thor, Thor II, Thor XVI), and subsequent compatible machines (Q40, Q60, Q68), and hardware boards for other PCs (QXL card), and its OS continued on other hardware (SMSQ/E).
It has Kickstart in ROM. That is, broadly, the bootloader. All the rest is loaded in from floppy.
The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.
With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop.
You can insert a disk with a desktop app and run that app from that disk with no other media at all.
Both of these are impossible on an Amiga, and with any Mac, 680x0 or PowerPC, except a single model: the Mac Classic, which has System 6.0.3 in a ROMdisk.
>With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop.
Correct. It's a little more direct than the Amiga.
With the Amiga, you need two extra steps:
- Initialize dos.library (which is in the rom). This is done by the bootblock of the floppy you boot from.
- loadwb command (starts workbench, which again resides in the ROM)
>The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.
This is not how I remember the Amiga.
Due to dynamic library support, LIBS: is the library path, assigned to SYS:Libs by default, where SYS: is the filesystem you booted from.
Thus, if you booted with your workbench floppy then loaded a program from another floppy, it'd keep requesting to insert workbench: back every time it needs a dynamic library. (or font, or printer driver...)
The workaround, if you knew how to use your Amiga, would have been to assign the program's floppy as the first in the list for libraries, preventing this.
But, generally, you'd boot with the program's disk, to use a specific program, that is easiest.
>Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous.
Uh, I own six, and disagree, profoundly.
>It has Kickstart in ROM.
That's the name of the ROM images, yes.
>That is, broadly, the bootloader.
This is not just "broad", but outright wrong.
The ROM contains, e.g.:
* exec library (kernel)
* graphics.library (display routines)
* intuition.library (windows and menus)
* amigashell (the CLI shell)
* workbench.library (literally, the Workbench)
dos.library, input.device, FastFileSystem and so on.
And, in 2.0+ ROMs, it even contains a bunch of shell commands (dir, echo etc) that reside in sys:c on older ROMs.
What's loaded from disk is your user programs and your data, besides any other libraries you might need (like diskfont.library, which is used to load fonts from disk, if you don't like the ROM provided one).
We had an 1040ST, which was later upgraded to 4MB.
It also received a DOS chip later on, which allowed us to run DOS software after a reboot. It was equivalent to a 286 I think.
Made music with this one as late as 2002... rock solid timing with Cubase, Akaï sampler for the sounds... And of course best feature was no internet so no distraction.
I had the occasion to have worked with some Apple ][ units first and found the Atari setups lacking. Terrible keyboard was an immediate put-off, though not nearly as horrid as the square chiclets on the Commodore PET. By the time they got around to better keyboards (though still no decent I/O expansion) the market had already moved on.
I didn’t heard of it until years later but I think it’s the computer I would have wanted (best value 32-bit, “hi-res” graphics, floppy storage). Especially when writing compilers for Z80 and 6502 I longed for something as beautiful, powerful, and regular as the m68k. However I don’t think there was any way I could have afforded it at the time.
That said, have their ever been less satisfying keys in all computing history than those mushy function keys?