Atari STacy (1989) | Hacker News Reader

Atari STacy (1989)

en.wikipedia.org

31 pointsindigodaddy12 comments

That was a great machine; I used one on stage built into a little flightcase; here is a picture: http://rochus-keller.ch/wp-content/gallery/fgk_1990/rochi_19... (from this collection: http://rochus-keller.ch/index.php/nggallery/page/1?p=457).

I think that the ST Book that came 2 years later is more interesting.

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

Or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio Atari Portfolio.

Featued in Terminator 2 and so slick all my friends asssumed it was just a movie prop, not a real device.

Also a weird feeling using an IBM XT (huuuuge computer) in school and the see a friend run the same software on his Portfolio. Disonnance and very much "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed".

If you squinted hard, the first iPhone was practically a 2001 PowerBook G4 (or a 2000 Power Mac desktop) in a pocket format. The CPU and GPU architectures were different but the performance was roughly the same. On the software side, all the OS underpinnings were carried over from Mac OS X even though the high-level UI framework had been trimmed down and somewhat redesigned for touch.

I wrote thousands of lines of C code on an Atari Portfolio, which was my portable development machine for a few years .. it had Turbo C on it, booted up real fast, and was all I needed to make tweaks in between visiting customers - I wrote database recovery software with it .. It was always very fun to break it out at the conference table upon arrival, make the needed changes (magic numbers), do a quick build and then plop the .com onto the target machine for processing ..

Still have those machines somewhere, great little devices.

> When Atari realized how quickly the machine would use up a set of batteries … they simply glued the lid of the battery compartment shut.

We’ve all had projects like this.

Definitely a more appealing design than the contemporary Mac Portable:

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

The Mac Portable weighed over 7 kg and used a lead-acid battery, like in a car. We’ve come a long way in laptops.

If I'm reading this right, the STacy was designed to use batteries, with even a space for a battery compartment, but the battery life was so poor they dropped the feature, leaving it weighing 6.9 kg WITHOUT batteries and requiring it to be tethered to a wall outlet.

The Mac Portable weighed 7.2 kg with a lead-acid battery that lasted up to 10 hours.

Computers were wild back ten.

Didn't stop the mod market!

> The Stacy was developed to use batteries, and the large block in the design on the right side below the display was set to hold 12 'D' cell batteries, but Atari soon found out that this arrangement could only power the Stacey for just a few minutes. Production units had this compartment empty, with no battery contacts inside. Later 3rd party companies would sell rechargeable battery packs (nickel-cadmium in those days) which could be used to make this a true laptop, but the run time was still poor.

https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=225

Hard to beat the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PPC_512

And nowadays an ESP32 is much more powerful and a little bit tinier.

The industrial design of that is actually quite impressive given how many ports it has.

Shame there's no pictures of the screen with it running, I guess it ran TOS and GEM though?

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