Say Atari and great video games spring to mind, right? After all, this was the company where video games legend Nolan Bushnell created the seminal Pong arcade' coin-op in 1972, then followed it up with Breakout. And who can forget the awesome Atari VCS games console in 1977, complete with fake corrugated wooden case and the first home version of Space Invaders?
While Atari was a force to be reckoned with on the games front, more serious projects were afoot. The Atari 400 and 800 ranges during the late Seventies and early Eighties proved Atari could cut the mustard on the home computer front, but better things were on the horizon.
In 1984, Atari was sold to former head of Cornmodete, Jack Tramiel, and from that day on, the company would focus on computers. The fruit of Atari's labours was a system employing a 16bit Motorola 68000 processor, which with 32bit internal architecture led to Atari coining the name ST - short for sixteen/thirty-two. The first model featured no less than 51 2KB of RAM, and hence was known as the 520ST (give or take a few kilobytes). Launched world-wide in 1985, the Atari 520ST weighed in at a not inconsiderable £750, but most crucially beat Commodore out of the 16bit gates. £750 was also sufficiently cheap for Tramiel to coin the slogan: 'Power without the price'.
In beating arch-rival the Commodore Amiga to the shops, Tramiel did, however, cut a few corners. The first STs operating systems were not in ROM, but instead supplied on 3.5 in floppies.
Worse still, Jack named the OS after himself, resulting in the unfortunately acronymed Tramiel Operating System. It did, however, employ Digital Research's GEM desktop, which was the first time a graphical user interface, had ever been seen on an affordable home computer.
The 520ST's 68000 CPU ran at 8 MHz, backed up by 512 KB of RAM and up to 192 KB of ROM. The system could drive a mono monitor at 640 × 400 pixels in crisp black and white, or a colour monitor at 640 × 200 in four colours or 320 × 200 in 16 colours, each out of a palette of 512 colours. A 360 KB 3.5 in floppy drive was built in, and a two button mouse supplied. There was no shortage of plugs: a ROM cartridge slot, a pair of joystick ports, video, parallel, serial, floppy and hard disk connectors, but most importantly of all, a pair of MIDI ports.
PC owners take it for granted that their joystick port doubles up as a MIDI interface, capable of talking to and controlling ail manner of musical instruments. Impressively, the ST boasted built-in MIDI 15 years ago.
On the games front the ST absolutely shone, with such classics as Jez San's 3 D Starglider 1 and 2, the addictive platform action of Bubble Bobble, and the
intricate adventures of The Pawn and Guild of Thieves.
Later, the 1040STarrived with 1 MB of RAM and TOS on ROM, and subsequent STs also included RF modulators for direct connection to a TV set. Much more exciting was the introduction of the Mega ST range, which separated the keyboard from the main processing box, and boasted 1, 2 or 4MB of RAM. At this point, Atari introduced the 20MB MegaFile hard disk and the SLMS04 laser printer, creating a new killer application for the ST: a complete desktop publishing system for less than the price of a typical IBM laser printer.
There was even more to come. Atari released the STacy, a portable ST albeit weighing a lap-crushing 15 lb. Next, the long-anticipated TT030 arrived boasting a modular case with removable hard disk, a 32 MHz 68030 CPU, along with SCSI, LAN and three serial ports on top of the connections already offered on the ST.
In 1988 Atari and lnmos announced the ATW800 Transputer Workstation, which combined the power of multiple T800-20 processors (each delivering 10 MIPS) running in parallel with the easy-to-use front-end of the Mega ST. However, by 1992, Atari was winding up its computer story with the Falcon 030, a 16 MHz 68030 system featuring DSP and hard disk audio recording in a conventional 1040ST case.
Atari was now focused on its Jaguar games console, but the less said about that and its consequences, the better. Let's instead head over to the appropriately named little Green Desktop website, download Paul Bates' superb WinSTon emulator (http://lgd.fatal-design.com), and, remember the good times when Atari offered a true GUI powerstation at a price IBM could only dream of.
Gordon Laing
Ah, memories! In 1988 I splashed out loadsamoney on an Atari 520 STFM with the internal floppy drive and TV modulator, ‘hi-res’ mono monitor, First Word Plus word-processing software, and a Star LC-10 9-pin dot matrix printer. The total bill was around £800. The software had the idiosyncracy that it would automatically renumber footnotes, but if footnotes were deleted so that note 10 became note 9, the spacing wouldn’t be adjusted and the leading space before the 9 had to be removed manually. However, given that I’d been word-processing essays using vecce on a VAX, not having to manually break and insert line endings to achieve a right-hand margin was a real improvement!
The monitor didn’t have a tilt-and-swivel base, so that was an add-on from Maplin. I can’t remember whether the dust cover was included or another add-on, but I had one of those too.
Even more than the computer, having my own printer made me popular at 3 a.m. on essay deadline days. I can remember carrying the printer from room to room, connecting it to friends’ computers (mostly BBCs), and smothering the printer with the downie to stop the screeching of nocturnal printing bringing the hall wardens in complaint.
When I left university I offloaded the whole bundle onto Luke Hockley for a mutually-agreeable consideration and it sat on his desk in Pathfoot (next to the answering machine with a 7-month guarantee …).
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