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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

The 1040ST was truly one of the more flexible and malleable computers in it's day.

Connectivity between computers using MIDI Cables, for example was a regular way to play networked games.

I feel extremely lucky to be exposed to an entire lab of them in Canada and it did the right thing at the time - feed the imagination in ways 5-10 years ahead of it's time in North America that other machines couldn't quite do it.

If these kinds of machines had caught on in North America like they had in Europe maybe the world would look different.

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Cheap. Atari ST line was the cheapest 32bit computer and also cheapest per megabyte computer on the market for a couple of years (4? maybe longer). It certainly wasnt great on its own, almost everything was a compromise, omission or a design defect ;) Electrically its a miracle they worked at all, try probing CPU bus sometime :o. "Bad DMA" chip recall (would erase your hard drive on first access) was actually caused by using too fast DMA chip picking too much interference for the overloaded bus. Lacked smooth horizontal scrolling because someone didnt think to wire one register inside Shifter chip making it terrible for games. Digital Audio added in STE line was also barely ~20 additional logic elements. Those free to implement scrolling and sound oversights in initial model sealed the fate of all games targeting lowest common denominator compatibility, which meant they sucked compared to Amiga.

On the other end of the spectrum advanced components at rock bottom dollar made it good business proposition, cheapest Macintosh replacement by a wide margin. Computer + razor sharp 640x480 70Hz monitor + Atari laser printer (no smarts inside! mechanics driven directly by the computer) + Calamus DTP package cost less than just HP/Apple laser printer alone, and managed to print faster too. Too bad US market was obsessed with status of brands and relegated Atari (and Amiga for that matter) to the toy section.

It really was a great machine for the price, and despite all the defects you mention above was really a very productive machine. The mistake people in the industry/press made was judging it against the Amiga as a games or graphics machine; it really was more of a productivity machine that could also play games pretty okay. It slotted between a PC and a Mac in terms of style and architecture; Mac-like GUI but MS-DOS or CP/M style OS.

It's not a surprise all the hardware corner cutting and oversights and omissions (no blitter until it was too too late ...) because the modus operandi was Rock Bottom Price and they were racing against the clock to get it out before Commodore could launch the Amiga.

But I feel it really fell over because of the Tramiel's odd cutthroat business style. They screwed their retailers, and they did a terrible job on software development. Hardly anything was done on the OS after the initial rather brilliant release. They just didn't invest in it until they did a big burst of quality work on it when they hired Eric Smith and brought MiNT in house etc. around the turn of the decade and the release of the Falcon and the TT030. But by then... too late.

Racing release dates to the point of introducing unfinished gear was plain stupid and seem to have never worked for Atari. Besides Amiga 1000 was a flop, official Germany (best Amiga market) numbers put it at ~1% of total sales (27K units), extrapolating over all worldwide Amiga sales ever gives us ~100K A1000 units in 8 years. Amiga only started gaining momentum after 1987 A500/2000 release. Atari did exact same thing with Jaguar, released broken early silicon (afair second spin, first one that actually booted, but no working cache etc) with broken (compiler bugs, crashing code) and expensive devkit ($30K? Falcon based box). For comparison later Playstation devkit was half that, and in form of standard PC ISA cards.

Just saw this now - the ST's definitely were able to breakthrough as business computers in Europe... there was some great business/design software for it, Calamus being the most memorable.

Calamus, Canvas, so many apps that were unusually capable. I got to work with 1040ST's as well as a Mega ST.

There was a great deal of software available for Atari too, most of it from Europe but I don't recall it being much of a slouch at gaming - especially for the RPGs popular at the time. I wouldn't have an Amiga experience to compare it too except the graphics were definitely better.

In Sacramento around 1990 there were monthly MIDI Maze meetups where we would all network our computers with MIDI and play. I was popular at these meetups because I had two Atari STs and would always bring them both.

We occasionally got up to the maximum of 16 players, but it got a little slow and unstable sometimes. We usually tried to form multiple rings of 6-10 computers.

I remember a Star Trek type game that was really popular, and of course Revenge of the Mutant Camels.

I really should find an emulator, but it's too much fun being on the creating side of life now than consuming.

Taking a peek on Ebay, it's odd to see the value of STs going up - I had the chance to pick up a setup 5-10 years ago and passed.

so many great european games! and the demoscene was amazing!

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