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Comment by bdamm | Hacker News Reader

That's so cool. There's a few old programs I'd love to see but since it's been over 30 years I can't recall their names.

- A music composer that took advantage of the MIDI ports. Connecting the software to synths etc would allow the Atari ST to not only control the synth, but also to record the music in note form as it was played.

- A BASIC interpreting environment. Noteworthy for no reason other than this was the place where I wrote my first program ever.

- A desktop publishing application with similar functions to the early Pagemaker.

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> A music composer that took advantage of the MIDI ports.

Cubase or C-Lab Notator.

> A BASIC interpreting environment.

GFA BASIC.

> A desktop publishing application

This may be Calamus. Interesting fact: "an Atari Desktop Publishing system consisting of an Atari Mega ST computer, mono hi-res monitor, SLM804 printer and desktop publishing software cost less then an IBM or Apple laser printer alone." [1]

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/16bits/printers/laser/s...

Timeworks Publisher ST was another desktop publishing app for the ST.

Plenty of ST BASICs mentioned here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BASIC_dialects

Atari ST MIDI stuff, with screenshots: http://www.atari-music.fddvoron.name/timidi.htm - Cubase was the famous one, but since the ST had MIDI ports built in there was no shortage of others.

Masterscore? Wasn't too much into MIDI back then.

GFA Basic was a popular Atari ST replacement

Calamus? Although it never struck me as horrible as PageMutilator.

PageWrecker was actually pretty cool - did lots of school newspapers (legit and underground) back in the days...

Steinberg pro 24, or Cubase. as studio-class software. Usually hooked up to akai s900/s1000 samplers, and Yamaha DX7s If it was notation, then C-Lab Notator

GFA basic or Hisoft basic (along with the many other dev languages that Hisoft had)

Calligrapher in the UK, Pagestream, Calamus.

I believe the BASIC interpreter was TrueBasic: https://www.truebasic.com/atari

And probably PageSteam for the the desktop publishing app.

Not sure on that MIDI composer.

The most famous BASIC environment was the incredible GFA Basic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC

Ah yeah, I forgot about that one too. I had switched to True Basic at some point and completely forgot about GFA.

I built a full CAD-CAM environment in GFA that lives on to this day as the core of a lathe / mill combo with integrated software. It was an incredibly productive environment, the whole thing clocked in at 50Kloc and a few thousand lines of assembly code to make it run very fast.

I thought Omikron BASIC [1] was even better

but both were really awesome compared to what existed on other platforms back then. In particular, I liked their documentation. Those were great times for documentation (not just BASIC, also TOS, GEM etc from that time more than today's. Either there were more qualified tech writers per product, or the products were simpler ... or maybe just nostalgia.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omikron_BASIC

I wrote my first basic on a BBC, but at home I had STOS on an STE. I loved it at the time too.

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