Atari ST in daily use since 1985 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Atari ST in daily use since 1985 [video]

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268 pointspmarin162 comments

I had the exact same use case for my parents' camp site in France. In 1997, I had programmed a camp site management software for the Atari 1040 ST in GFA Basic. It was used for booking reservations, registering new guests, and printing invoices.

At the time, this solution (both the computer and the programming language) were already outdated by at least 5 years. But it was the cheapest solution for my parents, since they couldn't afford a new computer (having just started the camp site).

Of course, it took me hundreds of hours to complete the software but I didn't mind since the project allowed me to sharpen my programming chops at a pretty basic level. For instance, I had to implement my own scrolling routine (there were no text areas in GFA Basic).

Theoretically it should have been possible to make system calls to GEM routines (the UI library in ROM) in GFA Basic, but I never got it to work.

The computer was used until 2005 or so, when the disk drive gave out.

[edit: grammar]

ah yes GFA Basic. I loved it.

Wrote a lot of dumb and some quite useful applications with it. I had the ignorance back then to think I could write my own database system. Which I did.

But it lacked almost all attributes of a real database system

Eventually I got Lattice C and that was the start of a long and close relationship with C that helped me through academia and later on jobs.

Every now and agan I download and play with an ST emulator. I dont get the magic I felt back then.

The low resolution even black and white is just too limiting now. I only had a BW monitor for my ST.

I did find a way to get an emulator to run as a TT (oh how I wanted that back in the day). TT can be fixed to run at a semi decent resolution. Unfortunately, not much software could run on it. Most crashed right away.

>But it lacked almost all attributes of a real database system

Did it support ISAM files?

If BASIC had ISAM support from the beginning, maybe it would be as widely used as COBOL..

Big boys BASIC had support for ISAM,

http://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_vms-basic.html#demo2

Almost wants to make me boot up my AlphaServer! I have a DS10 rotting away downstairs.

Wow, that's a stylin' basic

I, as an Amigan, was always envious of GFA Basic for the ST. Then GFA Basic was ported to the Amiga, and I found it amazing how easy it was to fairly neat stuff with it.

We had AMOS instead. :)

Fair point! I personally only bought AMOS when I was already slowly on my way out from the Amiga, so I never really got into it.

Lattice C was where I got started with C, also. (On an Amiga, though.) 30 years later, most of that knowledge is still useful.

I have not kept up with the new versions of C the language but I can still pick up recent code and understand most of it That is a blessing

With C# 2 --> 9, the code can look entierly different.

Calling into GEM from GFA Basic was dubious because GEM AES made heavy use of void pointers, casting, and other C-isms. GFA was of course a garbage collected interpreted language. So GFA had its own wrappers for a bunch of stuff, but not everything.

It was an excellent basic though. With a top-notch IDE-like editor with auto-complete, auto-indentation, folding, etc. I tried for years to find a similar experience with other languages on Linux, etc.

I think something was lost during the last decades.

There we were using a mix of high level languages, with some C and Assembly along the way.

Some of us have watches more powerfull than they were, and yet there is this resitence to use more developer friendly languages like those used to be.

Like, probably someone would tell you that using Basic to code an ESP32 would be wrong, yet you experienced how good the development experience felt like in a similarly constrained hardware.

I think these days the JetBrains IDEs are as good or better than GFA's was. And as far as language, Python or Ruby are fairly close in experience.

I fired up GFA on an ST a few years ago just to relive the experience, and it wasn't as good as I remembered :-)

To be fair, JetBrains IDEs are absolute battleships in terms of features, but also of resource consumption. GFA is in its way much more elegant, especially regarding the capabilities of the systems it ran on.

Is python (micropython on the ESP32) truly worse?

No, and that is the point, ESP32 is more powerfull that most MS-DOS machines, and we had plenty of high level languages to chose from.

Naturally for games and demoscene, Assembly was the name of the game, but for LOB stuff?

Clipper, FoxPro and applications built with Turbo Pascal/Turbo Vision were all over the place.

One of the neat things about GFA Basic was its built in support for graphics. It was almost trivially easy to plot graphs of your math homework equations. Or to plot fractals (very slowly).

Absolutely. The planar colour graphics on the ST were awkward to work with, but GFA made it easy.

I feel the same way in the modern day about Processing.

https://processing.org/examples/mousepress.html

I have written GEM bindings to Lisp for the Atari ST, it isn't really tied to C.

Populating AES structures requires passing pointers to strings and various unions and packed structures INTIN/ADDRIN, etc. I remember this being not so simple with the GFA I had. Maybe later versions improved interacting with that kind of thing.

Ah yes, sounds like 3.0 added all the proper AES structures and a bunch of other goodies https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n6/gfa_basic3.html

I just learned from Wikipedia that Frank Ostrowski, creator of GFA basic, passed away about 10 years ago

Reminds me of that Commodore 64 still in use in Poland at a car repair shop (at least, it was in use as of 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqA8YBwwCl0

Edit: the YT video cites this as the source (in Polish): https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Warszatat-samochodowy-z...

A source in English https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/09/polish-auto-shop-still-run...

I'm pretty sure I found an even older IBM pc from the 80s in Costa Rica in an auto parts store that I need to get evidence of... that one was supposedly used since 1994?

While Commodores are rare, there are many stores in Poland that still run DOS era software for store management.

My car repair shop runs some software for billing on DOS box currently (Portland, OR)

How can he write software without JavaScript and pulling 1500 arbitrary packages from npm? Is this even real?

I know, right? How did he fit Electron into 1Mbyte of RAM?

Simple, it's a thin client! ;-)

But that means it can fit even less!

I laughed while I was screaming inside.

The beefed-up version gets to a whopping 4 MiB!

OTOH, having to abuse the MIDI port for network connectivity makes downloads rather slow. And how many floppy disks would Electron require?

I had Ultima 6 for the Atari ST. Running off floppies was kind of slow. My friend's Atari ST machine had 4MB of memory. So I set up a 3MB RAM disk. And installed the game to 'hard disk' with the RAM disk as the hard disk. Then all I had to do was format some floppies to really high density. The entire U6 installation fitted on (I think) 2 floppies. I also used a rapid file copy program.

I copied the files to RAM disk, played the game, saved the game, quit the game, and saved the files back to floppies.

Just thought it would interest someone.

I recently bought a (very) old game from GOG. The install directory contains two 48x48 icon files ("gog.ico" and "support.ico") and the game exe file. Together, the two icon files are larger than the exe file...

Swapping floppies.

The ST was a wonderfully practical computer. Nobody could beat the price/performance and price/memory for it at the time. An ST with a monochrome monitor was a beautiful Mac-like word processing or DTP or MIDI sequencer system with an excellent (for the time) high resolution paper-like display, GUI. For 1/3rd the price of a PC/Mac.

The ST is often compared to the Amiga, but I don't feel like this is the right comparison point. It should be compared to the Mac and PC as productivity machines.

Yes, the ST could play games and do colour multimedia stuff, but it did not do it as well as the Amiga. But the Amiga shipped with an interlaced monitor, had longer boot times, cost more, shipped with less memory, and its software market focus was not so much on productivity.

I learned a lot on my ST. By the time I replaced it with a 486 I was running a UUCP node and a Unix-like shell and OS extension on it (MiNT) and learning the basics of Unix.

I love the part where he compares it to the PC and says he can finish his task on the Atari in the time it takes the PC to boot up. Similarly on uptime, he just turns it on at the start of the season, leaves it running 24/7 and powers down months later. Beautiful.

I remember travelling to NY with my father for turism, but also taking the opportunity to buy an original ibm PC XT for 5000 dollars, which was half of what it costed at my home country. IBM PC AT with a powerful 286 was already out but much more expensive. And we were too newbies to know that we could get a PC clone.

Anyway, I remember there was both the Amiga and the Atari ST. But my father wanted an IBM. You know, nobody got fired for buying IBM ;)

I have very little respect for the IBM PC. It was huge, heavy, loud, slow (writing characters via the BIOS had to wait for the blanking intervals on CGA or you’d get “snow”). My Apple II booted up faster, loaded programs faster and could print to the screen faster than the monitor could refresh.

Ya. At the time, I was an Apple partisan. I just could not understand how the PC XT was more successful than the Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers.

With hindsight, it was probably my first experience with "worse is better".

A phenomenon I still don't understand, frankly. JavaScript? ffs.

There was one exception. My bestie's dad bought a HeathKit/Zenith Z-150 kit. That was kinda cool. https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFly...

I think, what is often overlooked as to why the PC won the market is exactly its hi-res textmodes;

1) The BIOS was insanely slow yes. But on the other hand it was really fast when you wrote to the screen memory directly (address $B8000).

An entire screen in 720x400 resolution VGA, was represented by just 80x25x2=4000 bytes (2 bytes per char code + color attributes). A single plane bitmat graphics mode (just black and white) in same resolution would be 36000 bytes.

So scrolling through documents/spreadsheets was very fast compared to graphics modes, which most other platforms used. And screens used less memory.

The simple text-modes were also really easy to develop for.

2) The high-res text (720x400x16) and graphics modes (640x480x16) on VGA were non-interlaced (unlike e.g. the first Amigas), so they felt more solid and you could work with them longer before getting tired.

While this is true - it is possible to bypass the BIOS (at the cost of "snow" on early CGA adapters), most of the competition for the IBM PC also had text modes. My Apple II+ running CP/M had a board with a 6845 CRTC, the same used in the CGA and MDA. Apple ///, //e and others had 80-column text modes pretty much built-in. While the memory layout on the Apple II was more complicated, you could call routines in ROM that were very fast. The same approach was used in later machines such as the Amiga, the Mac and the STs - using the ROM or OS routines was the standard way to do things, much like bypassing the BIOS and directly addressing the hardware was the standard way to work on the PC (remember how the "gold standard" of compatibility was being able to run Flight Simulator). With these later machines, we learned that looking to the hardware from too close was a compatibility issue.

> Similarly on uptime, he just turns it on at the start of the season, leaves it running 24/7 and powers down months later. Beautiful.

It is beautiful but...

That said a PC running Linux can do this too without any problem. Back when I was solving a long computation on one core, I've had my "workstation" at home (just a regular PC running Debian GNU/Linux) reach months of uptime. Typically a black out (I have no UPS battery) would end the uptime.

You probably shouldn’t do this as much because kernel security vulnerabilities will get fixed in the meantime and your wireless router may have been breached making your local networks hostile.

I make my computer hostile enough that viruses and intruders backoff when they meet it.

Same here. Whoever gets past all the layered defenses has earned whatever data they can exfiltrate.

I'm not advocating to do this but anyway there are times at which more than six months goes by without any mandatory kernel vuln fix requiring a reboot. And not all kernel vulnerabilities do affect all setups, especially when the system is used not as a server but simply as a "workstation" (with 0 ports opened or maybe just the SSH one).

I was just commenting that modern machines can be very reliable too.

Yeah, but then again, wouldn't the equivalent Atari have security issues and require reboots for updates, too? Provided anyone would provide those updates.

Given the lack of connectivity, I imagine the security concerns there are much less serious.

Windows can do the same. My home PCs have been running Windows 7 and Windows 10, I never turn them off and they've probably been rebooted maybe 20 times, several times because of moving house, since 2009.

It's been ages since I've used Windows - does it not still force reboots for updates after that much time?

It does force updates but my personal experience has been it's something that happens less than once per month. Maybe even less than once per trimester.

It's majorly overblown.

And I've definitely not had the "Windows trying to restart while I'm holding a presentation in front of key customers", though, with a billion users anything that can happen, will.

Windows 10 forces reboots these days to update. It happens relatively often.

It doesn't force them as often as you hear in the press. I would notice because I have various windows open that wouldn't be open on restart.

Depending on what you were doing those bombs could appear. Then you would had to reboot the machine.

But most of the time it was indeed pretty stable.

some of the ICs they used were socketed and with time (and perhaps transportation to a few too many midimaze parties) those connections would start to fail resulting in more bombs than one would like.

there were two solutions: take the device apart and reseat the chips methodically, one by one. -or- lift the machine 3" off the desk and drop it flat to produce a terrifying crunch sound, if you dared.

the second method was more effective and less risky in the end.

The DIY is strong also in the website for the camping!

So much love.

https://www.bohmerwald.nl/index2019.htm

He's avoiding the second system effect.

He is also avoiding the HN hug of death!

Nice! If you click on 'Plattegrond', you can actually see the artwork seen in the booking application on Atari!

I think the PDF even has some Print Shop art.

And if I read that right, the local computer club is meeting there every first Sunday of the month.

> And if I read that right, the local computer club is meeting there every first Sunday of the month.

The event page hasn't been updated since 2019, so may no longer be true.

Nothing ever changes at camp sites. Go there next year, same people, just their children got a bit older and louder.

Is it served from the Atari?

And in fact, if it wasn't for modern Web pages, ray tracing like graphics or modern network protocols, most of the Amiga and Atari generation computers could be easily used for most of the school and office work going on in 2021.

I often think about this. We do clearly waste CPU cycles by the boatload these days, but what would the carbon footprint be like if we were still using these machines now? How does the power consumption compare? How would it compare if we were still using the protocols and languages of the past?

(I'm not an 'everything was better in the old days' kinda guy, but I do think about this just as a curiosity).

Regarding the languages it is easy, hence the pressure of going back to AOT or at very least JIT caching across runs.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/04/11/facebook-and-cpp/

> One reason Facebook is shifting more work to C++ is to reduce operating costs such as power consumption per user.

Good reference, but that post is from 2012. There are better choices nowadays. Language-provided memory safety also allows you to run more of your code within a single address space (barring information disclosure concerns, aka Spectre/Meltdown of course) - this is effectively what modern "async" programming is. Not that different from the kind of code you would write for a random 16-bit machine.

What is modern async programming? I/O multiplexing with the select system call came out in 1983 and async programming has been exactly the same ever since.

Edit: I misunderstood your 16-bit comment. Yes, in the 80s and 90s async was popular like it is today because processes were expensive. Even on 32-bit. So multiplexing was a good strategy whether in a preemptive OS like SunOS or a cooperative OS like 16 bit Windows. Then Java and various web server architectures came along and people got comfortable with threads, and the OSes got relatively efficient with them.

It was not better. Power supplies in the 80s were not very high efficiency. They did not have much in the way of low dropout regulators meaning the boards blew waste heat constantly with few sleep modes invented yet. It wasn't even cpu cycles generating that heat, just resistive waste. All of the peripherals like disks and of course the CRT had quiescent draw as well.

So the 80s were not good. The 60s and 70s -- even worse. Gas had lead. And it spewed everywhere and we'll never get it out.

I remember reading that the Apple 2e was the first device with a switching power supply and the power supply design revolutionized power supply design for years to come. Is that true?

It's not true. Woz's genius switching power supply was what made the Apple ][ special long before the 2e was even dreamed of.

Apparently not, see link provided in the other reply:

http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...

Jobs lied and, additionally, Woz did not design that power supply as you suggest.

In the book "I, Woz", Steve Wozniak explains that Jobs hired a random hacker Rod Holt to design switching mode power supply unit for their Apple II computer. Jobs paid him $200 a day which was a lot of money by that time. Rod did the best work he could.

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

http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...

This was amazing to read. Thanks for correcting me and string the record the straight for me. Jobs was not telling the truth.

I'm glad you liked the article. If you want something more "official", here's a link to the IEEE Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-half-century-ago-better-transist...

Love your website, Ken. I discovered it some time back from HN (long before I registered an account here). You are an inspiration.

But computers use a lot more power nowadays. The early home computers were all passively cooled. My Atari ST power supply actually broke down on me so I had to buy a new one from Great Britain. It's a quite small affair with quite minimal venting through the grills at the top of the chassis.

Some computers use more power today, some use less.

If you walk down to your local electronics store, there's probably a few passively cooled laptops on the shelf. Not to mention mobile devices.

And we don't use CRTs anymore which is also a significant power savings.

More passive cooling nowadays would be great, I am totally with you there. But the 80s were awful. I drank water from lead pipes. The fuel economy was atrocious. Murder rates through the roof. They didn't have statins so my dad's friends had heart attacks in their 40s, despite not smoking or anything. Colonoscopy? What's that? Everything is truly better. Sadly, democracy is not advancing as fast as technology though. I would say the 80s had some fun tunes and cute artistic tastes that I still enjoy. Hope not to forget those.

One of my dream projects is a graphical, single-user operating system for, say, small ARM microcontrollers. You can easily get 10x the computing power of an Atari that runs in tens of milliamps.

The problem with microcontrollers for this purpose is memory, not processing power. It's typically measured in KB.

I think the problem is those protocols were arbitrary implementations due to the desire of companies to try to lock-in developers and consumers. This led to the constant churn of hardware and software we all experienced even with our smartphones. Now, it just seems silly but now I think we need as a community (developers, even electrical engineers who work on hardware) need to hammer out the core implementations but that's just a pipedream obviously. :)

Sometimes I wonder too, but your list of exceptions already points to why it's not likely to be true. The datasets that "regular" Excel users mangle easily can consume many megabytes. Write a document, add some graphics... remember how slowly JPEGs used to render?

I fully share the nostalgia though, but as a practical matter I don't think your statement is true.

I wrote some amazing papers in Signum! at the time, pushed the LDW spreadsheet to its limits, wrote cool stuff in GFA Basic, fondly remember the Tempus editor, learned C with Turbo C... it was magical, but for getting stuff done I don't I'd want to go back.

I'd love to reclaim some of that magic for today's world.

> how slowly JPEGs used to render?

It’s mind blowing we had programs specifically for viewing GIFs and JPEGs.

PictView and xv for the win!

I still use xv. And yes, I registered it :)

Even now you can pretty much fire up any Unix workstation from the 90’s and, through the magic of X, work away with the beautiful design while your modern 100% style-free generic PC does the heavy lifting.

Given the effort some kids go through nowadays to replicate the experience I had with twm and DG/UX on IBM X Windows terminals in 1994/95, I wonder why bother.

This is one of the most underappreciated features of Unix's interoperability. Back in college, I carried around a wimpy tablet PC running Linux, but "ran" most of my applications on some random Solaris box in a lab.

This was invaluable to me, because otherwise I'd have had to fork out money I didn't have for MATLAB and the like - or sit in the lab all day, like everyone else.

When I was working at a portal, we had piles of discarded PPC macs. I installed Apple’s MkLinux on one and used it as my second workstation.

Months later, after I left, I visited the floor as a consultant and pretty much every engineer and sysadmin had one on their desks.

Honestly, we've gone backwards in a lot of ways.

I remember, in the mid-90s, looking up stuff at a library on a VT100-ish terminal connected via some sort of serial arrangement to a larger computer.

Function keys were clearly labeled, searching was fast and worked well.

None of the heavier replacement machines ever felt as snappy or as useful.

> we've gone backwards in a lot of ways

Yes, but not everywhere. For example, mid '90s software of top professional grade keeping the CPU on all the times.

One of the differences is that some systems of yore looked more rooted in the engineering mindset, whereas today some perceive a way overly "excessive" (in fact, simply wrongly headed) focus on the dumbest specimen (and not to help it but to celebrate it).

Edit: ...so, on a different side, in the old times we could approach technology with full joy, whereas today there are many reasons to approach products with suspect and diffidence.

Just like anything else unfortunately. Similarly, a good scientific calculator in the hands of an engineer is an indispensable tool, but to the general public, it's a confusing mess.

The early internet was designed by and for the people who knew what they were looking for and simply needed the tools to find it.

"You, deserving engineer, can now have the slimmest scientific calculator on the market"

(after a review read years ago that declared the reviewer and the buyers wanted paper-thin telephones)

Modern engineering calculators have streamlined the design and done away with numbers and function buttons. You just hold them in your hand and pose while looking at the ads displayed on the screen.

> One of the differences is that some systems of yore looked more rooted in the engineering mindset, whereas today some perceive a way overly "excessive" (in fact, simply wrongly headed) focus on the dumbest specimen (and not to help it but to celebrate it).

I think this is largely due to the increasing pervasiveness of computers. "Back in the day" the consumers of a software package were likely either very skilled people, or people who were paid to use the software as part of their job, and thus would receive training. Nowadays, there are many more types of computer user.

> mid '90s software of top professional grade keeping the CPU on all the times

Apart from MS-DOS which was already on the way out, mid-90's (even mid-80's) operating systems were already mostly multi-threaded and event-driven and the CPU was idling most of the time (at least in UI applications). They most definitely wasted much fewer CPU cycles per input event than 'modern' operating systems and applications.

Yes but it was a transition. So some very prominent software applications still were not event driven approaching year 2000. Then the new paradigm caught - but the frameworks became increasingly complex.

The library example is a great one. They used to run some flavour of TSS / UNIX -- I want to say "Bullfrog" or "Bulldog" but I know that's not right -- and it was childs play to operate them. Literally in fact, since they'd have those same systems in schools too.

Then in the mid to late 90s the UK libraries near me switched to Windows 95 + Internet Explorer 4 (albeit massively locked down) and everything was slow. You could visibly see the page load. It would crash often. But above all else, it wasn't any more intuitive than the TUIs of green screens.

I get GUIs are better for home computing interfaces but I never understood why they replaced TUIs in fields where the primary focus is text input. eg call centres and data entry teams, those old green screens were much easier and quicker for agents to use than any of the web forms that replaced them.

I always put it down to lazy development. It's easier to build website and host it on Apache/NGINX than it is to build a green screen and deal with hardening remote terminal access.

I would think it should be possible to replicate the UI pretty well on a website, to make it just as quick. Data transferring behind the scenes making it just as snappy.

Still lazy development, I guess.

> some flavour of TSS / UNIX -- I want to say "Bullfrog" or "Bulldog" but I know that's not right

Maybe something by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Bull

YES! That's exactly it! Before your post I was starting to worry I was getting confused with Bell Labs. Thank you

I don't disagree with your point, but one consideration is that GUIs are going to feel more familiar to most people, particularly non technically savvy people. Most people wont care about the objective efficiency of an interface - if it looks and feels like something they would use on their computer at home, they will feel more comfortable and adapt to it quicker. A TUI will be less familiar, more likely to be looked at as "old" and "clunky" (irrespective of its its merits) and thus people will adapt to it more slowly.

Obviously, "back in the day" TUIs were the only option, but computers were not as a prevalent back then, so there was no familiarity factor to leverage.

> Most people wont care about the objective efficiency of an interface

They do in the job roles I exampled because a large part of their job is quick entry. I have experience building and supporting systems for those types of users and a frequent comment is "I want to be able to enter information as quickly as I can so I can keep up with the customer speaking their instructions". Some of the older agents even preferred green screens because they could write with one hand and type with the other (while wearing a headset) -- I never quite got how they managed to multitask like that but kudos to them for pulling it off.

Back around 1999 I worked for a company and one of the jobs we had was to replace a financial data entry system which was written in BASIC and run on an aging mini comupter. Access to it was done via a terminal and it was a text based interface. The reason for replacing the system was part of the company's Y2K plan and in preperation for the Euro.

The company wanted everything to run under Windows so it had to be a native app with a GUI. When we deployed it there was a flood of compaints. Most of them were about the speed of data entry and the fact that the old keyboard shortcuts they were all used to had stopped working.

We tried to fix as many of the issues that we could but there was only so much that we could do. As it was a contract job we had to work with the UI the company wanted and as it was a contract job, once the bugs were fixed we couldn't make any other changes.

> Most people wont care about the objective efficiency of an interface

This raises another important consideration. A lot of software isn't and shouldn't be aimed at "most people". A few weeks spent learning something less intuitive can easily pay off over the course of a professional career using the software if it affords those that know the interface well a faster or otherwise better workflow.

Just a reminder so that you people don't design CAD software for heavy use by professionals in the same way you'd design a tax form for almost everyone to use once a year.

In principle though. You _could_ build a nice TUI application using one of the modern TUI frameworks, that you launch from a 'normal OS' for these specific applications, and make the machines connect through some zero trust networking solution. I think the hardest part would be to get management buy-in, not anything technical.

Sorry, I didn't mean it was impossible or even hard to do. I just meant throwing a web site up is easier at all points of the stack. It's the same reason Electron is popular, writing native applications isn't exactly hard per se, Electron just makes the process easier and cheaper at all stages of development.

Well, in a static terminal UI there are only 80*24 spots where you can do something wrong as a programmer.

These days, it's 4k * 60(fps) * (programmer+UX person+UI person)

Ha, lucky break. I had to decommission mine after 10 years of use because the carbon layer on the keyboard wore off and some keys didn't make contact any more. I still remember the heartbreak.

That machine was immensely hackable. You could just malloc(), write 68k instructions into it and execute that stuff. I built my first JIT compiler on the ST. That word didn't even exist back then.

That was my first real computer as a kid, where I learned basic programming (GFA BASIC!), played my first games. It was such a great machine.

I also love his self-made program with a little map of the camping grounds. Such attention to little details. No wonder he didn't want to give that system up for a newer computer: what for?

same here! such fun! i wrote my first "network" game on the atari st, two machines with crossed midi cables would present arithmetic problems and correct solutions moved avatar cars across both screens.

...because writing a networked computer "game" for learning arithmetic was obviously more fun than doing arithmetic drills.

I had the Atari 800 XL and then the Atari STE... both were good, the real the thing that seemed to keep the STs around for a long time after that generation had given way to PCs was the MIDI port and the music software.... I saw them years and years afterwards for that purpose.

Especially back when PCs out there where still all super noisy: silent PSUs / fans etc. wasn't a thing. So in music studios many would still rock Atari STs for they were totally silent even though we were well into the PC age.

This musician still uses a 1040 STE for making his music [1]. In the video (in Polish, unfortunately) he describes his setup: extended RAM, SD card reader, etc.

[1] https://youtu.be/mlR08iVHiFY?t=68

Cubase (now Steinberg Cubase) started out on the ST.

As did Logic.

Not just any old musician, here's Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) in his studio in 2018:

Still with Atari ST switched on, connected to the gear, and loading in old floppies of "The Rockerfeller Skank" from the 90s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLjgXPDzeZo

YouTube commentor says "it's like a living museum that should be kept alive" ... agree!

From my memory, I'm most impressed that the mouse has survived all this time.

I always thought the mouse itself was built like a tank, but I do remember having to regularly wiggle the connector in various directions until it settled in a position that continued to work.

I had to clean the button switches every once in a while, and IIRC one of them failed on me completely.

They were actually notoriously unreliable. I went 6 months without one for lack of money to replace mine. Using the ST without a mouse involved holding the Alt and arrow keys down, and man did that suck.

Your comment brings back long buried memories of the time that my ST mouse broke and I had to save up for a new one. Hearing the ST keypress sound repeating as the mouse slowly moved across the screen, 8 pixels at a time, and then having to do SHIFT+ALT+ARROW when you wanted to position the mouse pointer with pixel-level accuracy...

The M1 Abrams is actually just a modified copy of that mouse!11

There were some pretty good trackball options for the ST as well with a trackball of 50 mm.

We used them in the first generation of Style's lathe and mill CNC controller and some of those are also still in use in the most foul industrial environments. I know this because every now and then a monitor burns out and then questions will pop up on how to source a replacement. Those are 1040STs, sometimes with piggybacked extra memory to give them 2M, it's funny how the build quality of those machines was so bad that it wasn't rare to have one DOA from new, but once past the 90 days they pretty much last forever.

Yep, we purchased one in 1988 which died on us after about a week. But the replacement we got under the warranty lasted until 2005 or so (see my other post here), when the disk drive gave out.

I flunked my 9th grade in high school because of this machine.

I found some IBM computers running with green phosphor screens doing some database for inventory management at an auto parts store in Costa Rica one time. I need to go back and get a video of that, it was ultra impressive, but it's basically in the sketchiest part of town -- I'm not there at the moment but maybe any locals could collaborate, es por la parada de buses x leon 13 al centro chepe JAJA

My first computer was an Atari 65XE, the smaller 8-bit sibling of the ST series. Almost everything that was produced back then was well build and still runs today (even my 65XE). Atari means “about to win” and the history of the company is very interesting [0].

In the "old" days there was great competition in Europe between Atari, Amstrad, Sinclair, Commodore and later on Amiga. You can see a very nice timeline of home/personal computers in [1] and [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari [1] https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline//entry/501712/Personal-Co... [2] https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/

I really miss the ST's mono monitor, was a pleasure to use it, esp for CAD and DTP.

What a mean moustache Mr.Bos cultivated!

Ah, those where the days my friend. The days of manly man and physical manuals. Or the other way 'round.

Have to have a visit, when I'm nearby.

I send'em a mail with a link to this thread.

As i am also one of the weird guys using (or better now: has been using) totally outdated tech for daily work for years now (especially an 520 ST), i cannot recommend one modern operating system more then Haiku.

Haiku has everything i loved (and still love!) about the 16 Bit machines of the 80s / 90s (simple, snappy gui, incredible fast boot time etc.). I imagine if Atari or Amiga had survived the 90s, their OSes would look and feel like that.

I was watching a YouTube video a while ago about some 80s industrial band touring in the late 2010s. I forget which. In order to play all the synth tracks live they had to dig out an Atari ST and load up the sequencer software on it with floppies containing midi tracks and samples. It's hard to believe the floppies didn't die after all those years.

Like the 800/400 before it, and the Amiga, this generation of computers had such great tech hidden under such layers of junk. Hidden gems all over the place in these systems. Well worth some effort to learn how they delivered such power at a time when mainstream PCs were struggling with CGA graphics.

Makes me really anxious with regards to backups. I really hope he has that covered. Both with regards to data and a system to run the software on.

But I think he mentioned being able to run it in an emulator on the PC so it's probably fine as long as he actually has the data backed up.

This brings me back. My first computer as a kid was an Atari ST.

Near the end he stumbles through words trying to explain that he replaced the floppy disk drive. It sounds like he replaced it with USB? I wonder how that worked.

Sounds a bit like the gotek drives popular with Amiga modders.

Floppy disk emulator. Loads of them about and they're used everywhere from old synthesisers that store presets on floppy disk to retro computers of varying platforms.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=floppy+disk+emulator&iax=im...

They also have a web site and it's exactly what you'd hope for https://www.bohmerwald.nl

(the HTML must be from a 1990s version of Word!)

I bought my 1040st, and a dot matrix printer, with most of my first year's student loan. (Almost all of it.)

I was so embarrassed I told no one, even my girlfriend at first. It was a big expensive secret. My car was a Chevette, with a bad tranny. Anyone in their right mind would have bought a better car.

Not one teacher could differentiate type written papers, from dot matrix. Besides the fear of public speaking, I always worried a teacher would find out I didn't write my paper on a twpewritter.

I tried to get my girlfriend to like it, but it was a big No. I remember drawing, in Paint, a penis. I even got it to vibrate. (It was not easy back then.)

She thought it was cute, and we had sexy time, but she didn't like the machine. I could just tell she didn't like my computer.

In retrospect--maybe she thought I should spend that kind of money on her?. I remember thinking, I'm a glad about equal rights. After all she was from a wealthy family, and I was poor. (sorry about reminiscing.)

Now most of you think it was my dick pic, but it wasen't. I think she thought the computer was nerdy?

She wasn't happy with my Bullmastiff either, but I loved my dog. She didn't like it when my dog had her period. She once said to me, "It's the dog, or me?". I didn't say anything, but my Elsa was my family. It was no decision to be made. I would have died for that dog.

I don't think we ever liked each other, but boy was she attractive.

She's now some big wig at a computer company, and consultes on computing.

I only bought it for word processing.

I wasen't a computer guy. I just knew at the time college was a joke, and if I was going to write all those useless papers; I wasen't going to do it on a IBM, with Whitout.

I felt like I was cheating.

Got my degrees. Had a nervous breakdown. The world seemed grey, and depressing.

I got tired of looking at that horrid beige idle computer on my desk one day, and tossed it all. (I'm color blind, but thought that beige was horrid.)

I wish I kept it now though.

(I miss my dog, and computer. My girlfriend not so much, but she was stunning. Way out of my league.)

This is the strangest comment I have ever read on Hackernews.

It's still a good story and I like it :)

I don't have anything else to add.

Need more comments like his on HN.

My favorite part was him being happy about vibrating dick picture in paint.

> and we had sexy time

This sounds like 70s/80s Euro-English a la Borat, but I think you’re American. Well done.

It's memespeak from over a decade ago. Here's an example: https://www.memecenter.com/fun/312757/sexy-time

Borat came out in 2006.

This is great stuff for a "coming of age" movie or Netflix series!

Is this comment written in green text? I can't tell because my 1040STe only has a monochrome SM147 monitor. atari.jpg

This comment is equally odd and beautiful. It flows like a nonsense dream. I picture it like the images generated by an AI. Thank you for sharing it. I'm not sarcastic/ironic about it.

The s was quite a journey!

> I got tired of looking at that horrid beige idle computer on my desk one day, and tossed it all.

> I wish I kept it now though.

So it goes with a lot of electronics and other products (could be anything, even magazines). They start off at high value and dip to lower and lower values for us until they reach 0 value (or even negative value because of the space and weight they take up), but then when they become harder to find again they start gaining value again. Unfortunately we can’t just hoard everything either.

Your comment reminds me of Kary Mullis's Nobel lecture

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/lect...

This is why I enjoy HN so much: it introduces me to the entirely unexpected.

I was on the fence about this comment. I was contemplating whether or not it was authentic. Then I got to the part about the dog, and I decided, "This guys alright by me."

This is a fun post, but I can't bring myself to believe...

> Not one teacher could differentiate type written papers, from dot matrix.

It just strains credulity. Daisy wheel, sure, but not in the history of dot matrix printers, from start to finish, were they comparable to typewritten output.

The 24-pin ones used to advertise themselves as being almost indistinguishable from a typewriter. If you didn't look too closely, they actually were.

You could get close to inkjets and early laser printers with Signum! on the ST and 24-pin dot matrix printer. It used custom bitmapped fonts and very fine control of the pins to generate amazing output.

It was very slow in the highest quality setting, but most people couldn't tell it apart from much more expensive solutions. It also had an astounding equation editor which made it great for STEM work.

"too closely" hardly qualifies IMO as "indistinguishable".

Maybe I'm a printer nerd, but I could generally tell the printer manufacturer from its output in the time they were popular.

Not to mention that back then, I don't think any consumer-grade dot matrix used single sheet paper like a typewriter would. The tractor punched-hole bars on the side after removal would give it away; even that fancy super-perforated stuff.

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