Inside the 1040ST

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?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

I wish I still had it though.

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.

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.

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.

Ah sweet memories of slamming it on the desk over and over to get it working due to mangy plcc sockets.

Minix was ported early on: http://www.subsole.org/minix_on_the_atari_st

BYTE in March 1986 put the Atari ST on its cover <https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1986-03_OCR/page/n85/mod...>, because it was the first computer at a price point of less than $1 per 1K RAM.

I used one for a while. And for a while, it was the fastest Mac I used, too :)

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.

I had a 520ST and upgraded the RAM by soldering in 16 x RAM chips into empty slots in the top left. Good times.

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.

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.

The comments here reminded me of all the ST Format magazine I threw out.. and probably should have put on eBay for someone else to enjoy.

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.

Ran a Mac emulator on it and with a friend persuaded the HP laser driver to drive the ST laser printer. Fun days.

... and nowadays, retro-hobbyists can add USB(!) ports to the 1040ST: https://wiki.newtosworld.de/images/f/fd/Lightning_ST_IDE_USB...

So much nostalgia. And nobody seems to remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy

You've missed out!

Love the smack talk bout the Amiga.

Awesome bc it had a built-in MIDI port!!!

And a 68000 processor (at 8mhz IIRC) AND AN ENTIRE MEGABYTE OF RAM!!!!!

Nice, I have a short on mine that I need to suss out this weekend so this kinda helps.

aka "The Jackintosh"