Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre
goto10retro.com
goto10retro.com
I had a 1040 STe. I rigged up a hard drive (the Atari ST had what was effectively a SCSI bus built in, it just needed a small adaptor board to adjust some signals). Installed MiNT (a multitasking operating system extension) and the GNU tools and was in developer heaven.
The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). It was also a leading light in the music industry: I had a copy of Cubase v1.0 (a DAW), which was available only on the ST with its built-in MIDI out and MIDI through ports.
Unfortunately the company was run by the Tramiel family so it didn't really stand a chance. Then a couple of hears ago a derecho destroyed the drive shed where I kept all my old computers and I lost my ST. No more Time Bandits.
Just now, after your comment, I realized how weird was to have a 1040 ST in a printing shop instead of only Macs. He was also lucky on having a few people deciding on the technical and cost side.
> The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh).
I actually worked in the DTP industry. I did both write and typeset books.
Everything professional and semi-professional was made on Macintosh. You'd enter a bookstore and easily 99%+ of the books and magazines were typeset on Mac.
I don't remember the Atari ST as having a particularly good or influential font story neither.
I mean: yup, I was typeseting my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets on my Amiga. Doesn't mean it was a revolution.
The DTP revolution was the Macintosh.
It took far too long to come up with effective solutions for this, and the ones that did exist, like the A2024 grayscale square-ish megapixel pixel display, noninterlaced, were too late and had too many compromises.
The Amiga had an uphill battle against the head start mac enjoyed ( and seemed, to the casual observer, rather naturally suited to with its crisp black and white display) in DTP to begin with, and without a native laser printing, a good scanning solution, enforcdd UI consistency through quickdraw and most of all adobe, there was never a reasonable chance that it would seriously challenge Apple in that market.
The unsuitability of a very visibly interlaced display to fine detail black and white layout work insured it would never be tolerated by people who had to work with such tools 8 hours a day.
Totally agree about the absence of a pennies per unit midi port as being a damnable error on Commodore's part; likely one of the main reasons the non-pc market was fatally fragmented three ways instead of a possibly manageable two, and gifting the ST (which was in all other respects an admirable me-too effort at best), a lifeline by which wedge itself into the nascent multimedia production market, which really would have been better off entirely associated with one or two platforms rather than two/three.
Atari Corp only existed (and produced a 68k) because of his departure. Along with some key engineers. The Atari ST is in large part Shiraz Shivji's design, after coming over from Commodore where he worked on various things including the C64 and one of the ill-fated "business" computers that CBM was making.
I'm not sure what Commodore would look like if the Tramiels had stayed, though. It may have imploded in other ways. And Commodore under him really didn't seem to get software/platforms/compatibility.
Also the ST didn't get placement inside studios just because of the MIDI ports. It was also because it was a) $cheap$ b) completely reliable solid timing [no multitasking helps there] c) had a fairly Mac-like GUI d) the top-notch paper white 640x400 (pretty good resolution for the time) monochrome monitor & mode.
It also wouldn't have done well in studios if it weren't for the German software scene and the development of Steinberg's Cubase and e-Magic's Notator. The ST was popular in Germany. Most of the really good software came out of there (see also Calamus DTP)
Gluing a MIDI port into the Amiga wouldn't necessarily had brought that set of happenstances to the Amiga.
It was pretty feature complete, so much so that it could probably be used today as-is.
People who used it likely felt a drop off, even to something like Pagemaker, etc.
GDOS (part of GEM with proportional fonts etc) not shipping with the original machine was a huge mistake for one.
Still Calamus + the cheap Atari laser printer was a pretty amazing piece of DTP kid for the people who got it.
That and it was simple to just turn your ST into a Macintosh. But with higher resolution and slightly higher clock speed.
The desktop publishing revolution came when average Joe Schmoe could whip off a (almost) professional-looking typeset zine on his home desktop computer. That was An Atari ST, and Atari SLM, and Calamus.
The ST became the king of MIDI.
The Amiga was the queen of gfx and video.
Machintosh created and ruled the DTP revolution.
Still, they had so much in common. If the three companies had made one OS and all standardized on the Amiga chipset, they could have won over the IBM PC.
Of course, back then, they didn't know how the PC would crush them all, at that time the three thought they were each others biggest competitors.
The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.
It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.
It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc.
they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.
Then it became a battle of operating systems.
The Amiga was capable of 14-bit stereo sound in 1985. It required a trick that only became popular around 1990, but the hardware was capable on day 1.
Of note, the C64 was capabale of 8-bit sound on day 1 in 1981, but this was only discovered (by Linus Akesson IIRC) around 2010.
Much, much better than EGA.
It could go up to 16 colors in high res or 32 in low res, but this could slow down other operations.
and when the solutions did come they were burdoned by kludges necessary so as not to break backwards compatibility - and especially not to complicate life for the killer app of the platform at the non-gaming level, the video toaster, which was very tightly integrated with the Amigas interlaced video system.
ECS could do non-interlaced 640x480 (+overscan) with 4 colors. In the documentation, 35 nanosecond pixels.
AGA same, but with 256 (or 262144 HAM) colors.
I think Commodore made one monitor that supported a bi-modal scan rate, and it was something like twice as expensive as the the regular Amiga monitor range. I also recall a somewhat exotic NEC 17" flat-face CRT monitor that was completely out of the question pricewise for almost anybody except institutions, that also could do it by virtue of having a continuously variable sync clock from 15 khz up to 45 or so.
The problem is not VGA 31 kHz modes, but old 15 kHz ones.
Most Amiga modes are 15 khz. The average person with an A500 or A1200 would have a 1084S and get zero value out of the new modes.
the pc were the best thing one could get that was not a commodore or a bootlegged import chiclet keyboard from the uk.
the amigas were considered just expensive game machines. the apples were an extremely expensive status symbol, and the you felt like a fool because there was no compatible peripheral anywhere.
and the Ataris were unheard of.
Idk where outside the USA you are, but the IBM PC easily had the easiest time taking over the USA. Amiga and Atari were considered hobbyist computers while Macintosh constantly battled DOS until slowly fading to irrelevancy between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, not regaining real steam until Mac OS X 10.2-10.4.
The TI series was very common on the super low-end/hobbyist end, and Sinclair/Coco/Dendy/Timex/etc derivatives had negligible marketshare.
In Brazil we had mostly Sinclair, Apple II and TRS-80 (Model III and CoCo) clones and compatibles. PC clones were very expensive and only appeared later - and only became popular through smugglers, about the same time MSX 1.0 was introduced. I believe there was only one MSX 2 machine that was actually sold. Brands like Atari, Commodore and Apple were extremely rare. This was all because the military dictatorship reasoned, somewhat correctly, that in order to grow an indigenous industry, it'd need to prevent imports of small computers and heavily tax other segments.
The Sinclair and TRS-80 clones arrived in 1981, the Apple II in 1982 and the PC XT in 1983 (at the absurd cost of US$15K for a configuration that would be US$5K in the US. This dropped to around US$3K by late 1984 for a configuration of similar price as the US, so not the "many times more expensive" that most people remember). There were very few TRS Color Computer clones, a single Sinclair Spectrum and the single Macintosh clone was not never authorized (every computer launch had to be approved by the government). The two MSX officially arrived in 1985 but sales actually started in 1986. The PC AT clones only started selling in 1987 and 386 machines in 1989 - these were the longest delays of all. An even longer delay was in PC graphics, which were stuck at CGA from 1983 all the way to 1992 (with imports allowed there was a jump to VGA+Multisync).
With the exception of the Spectrum and Mac clones by companies that had invested heavily in their predecessors, nobody tried to copy machines with custom chips, so no Ataris, Commodore 64s, Amigas, etc. The Commodore Pet would have been easy to clone, but there was no preexisting market of contraband machines due to the awkwardness of lugging the built-in monitor.
After the reserved policy ended in 1991 a company called PCI do Amazonas brought the Amiga to Brazil and was officially still making the A1200 months after Commodore itself had shut down. So we did get one of the three 68000 machines, even if very late.
almost everyone and most companies bought grey market "imports from Paraguay". which were 1.5~3x the usa price for pc.
also there were two prominent cpu fabs (churning 8080 and 68k) that the usa managed to close, further digging there interval market into cheap clone territory with that joke that was the apple ii clone announcement in a fountain.
That still felt like a downgrade from that Atari ST in many aspects. Usability? DOS? Early Windows? Unix clones? UGH!
Sure, it had some oomph, but the ride wasn't smooth.
I remember in the late 80s a neighbor's friend would bring his Korg synth and hook it up to my neighbor's Atari ST. That was quite something.
Another thing the ST had that the Amiga didn't was a port of FTL's Sundog: Frozen Legacy. One of the very best video games of that era. FWIW that little FTL studio then went on to make another incredible hit: Dungeon Master (best selling Atari ST game ever and an incredibly prescient video game).
For whatever reason Dungeon Master got ported to the Amiga but Sundog: Frozen Legacy never did.
The monochrome monitor & mode was way better for productivity than interlaced Amiga high res. MS-DOS compatible floppies. Price. By far.
In any case I don't see them as directly comparable machines. The ST was made to be a cheap Macintosh or PC competitor ("Jackintosh"). Not a multimedia games machine. It wasn't terribly great at games, but it was a great productivity (and MIDI as you say) machine.
Other things the ST was better at:
• single-floppy operation (because the OS was in ROM)
• being useful for productivity with only 1/2MB RAM (ROM again)
• being more affordable until a price war that killed both companies
Me, I owned an Acorn Archimedes. But I used them all.
A single-floppy Mac or Amiga was a massive PITA to use. More RAM helped but didn't cure it. Until adding a hard disk didn't triple the price (end of the 1980s, early 1990s) you needed dual floppies for Mac or Amiga. ST was... OK with one.
However, fundamentally, there were problems that could not be fixed. The entire OS was based on shared memory and message passing based on pointers. Tasks (processes) would read/write each others memory all the time. There was basically no way to implement memory protection without breaking all compatibility.
Why? Because it implemented syscalls through proper TRAPs, for one. While the actual implementation of the core OS wasn't multitasking or even have re-entrant syscalls, others came along and made it so (MiNT, etc) while retaining syscall compatibility. And the thing can be made to use memory protection, etc. even.
The problem with the whole Amiga package is that it was brilliant for 1985, but extremely dated for the mid-90s and the reliance on the custom chips arch there just really couldn't evolve well.
This manifested in 3D games where the processor did all the rasterisation. If the Amiga could bring it's blitter to bare, it won every time. If not, the ST would squeak it.
It's a shame the Blitter chip that came with the STe never shipped with the original ST (wasn't ready in time) and just never really got large market penetration after that. It was actually a decent design.
The STe feature-wise is quite competitive with the Amiga overall, while keeping the simplicity of the ST's architecture. There just wasn't enough of them shipped for software houses to bother making games that used it.
That, and I have a couple Atari Falcon 030s here, and they're really amazing. They really nailed it with that machine, before packing it in.
Better (and very good) video modes, amazing sound, onboard 56k DSP chip & S/PDIF audio, both IDE & SCSI drive support, 68030 processor, up to 14MB RAM.
In the UK, the Atari ST was originally £299 while the Amiga was £499, so it's not really fair to compare the two. I was able to save up for an ST with various weekend and school holiday jobs, but there's no way I could have saved up for an Amiga (and the only classmates I knew with Amigas had their parents buy it for them).
Amiga 500 evened things out a little bit, but it was still a step up.
Price per mhz/MB was better than anything else out there.
Oh, man, that brings back memories. I didn't much get into games, but I did play Sundog on my ST quite a bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake
at the age of 33.
With a dream black/white monitor, this was a wonderful machine to improve one's programming skills on with structured programming and to do systems programming (TOS/GEM) on - it was the monitor and the available range of compilers that made me want an ST ASAP.
(At the same time, the Amiga had more powerful graphics hardware, but was very slow if you did not have a harddrive and "Kickstart ROMs", as it originally required two floppy disks to start up, not just one. The Amiga had a sophisticated OS but I always felt it was too demanding for the hardware it was running on.)
You'd occasionally see one but the personal computers scene in Europe was clearly dominated by the Atari ST and the Amiga. You'd also see a few Macintosh. The Archimedes has always been a rare sighting.
This is another jewel few people in the Americas have experienced.
And unlike the ST or Mac or Amiga, its OS is still around, still FOSS, still actively maintained, and runs on modern bare-metal hardware, without emulation.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
That says a lot about success and longevity.
Several ST OSes have FOSS recreations. DR's layered, cleanly-layered design lent itself to piecemeal re-implementations.
Aranym runs AFROS, with multitasking thanks to MINT, which is a compilation of FOSS bits:
https://aranym.github.io/afros.html
Aranym needed a ROM and the devs wrote a skeleton with most stuff stubbed out. This has led to a full scale ST TOS recreation, with the original's limitations: it's single-tasking and so on:
https://emutos.sourceforge.io/
The FreeMINT OS is also FOSS:
MagiC was a 3rd party commercial re-implementation:
https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources
https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/AtariX
But there's no new 68k hardware. Emu68 is working on a JIT runtime for the Raspberry Pi:
It might have been impressive but it had to stand next to the dazzlingly attractive Amiga.
Amiga was just something else. Impressive achievement, certainly. But for what it was I had no need to pay that kind of extra $$ just to play games better.
dazzlingly expensive as well.
I never had one back in the day (in fact I wasn't even alive yet), but became aware of it when my interest in the demo scene and chip music started in my teens. The ST's sound chip, the YM2149 - an antiquated PSG based design, was of course made fun of back in the day by Amiga and even C64 owners. But ironically something about the sound it makes spoke to me and I had to get one. The history of the ST demoscene is quite interesting to explore chronologically, seeing the hardware get pushed past it's boundaries time and time again as the years went on, and the rivalry with the Amiga scene is fun.
Recently I've been doing some retro coding on it for fun, setting up okami shell, MicroEMACS, and a sort of make wrapper [1] for the Pure C compiler, using some available C libraries to make a little curses-like SNDH player for myself. Of course using a cross-compiler on a PC would be simpler but where's the fun in that?
Then I heard about Amiga 1000, but it was too expensive. But those colors and sound!
Eventually I had an Amiga 500. But it could have gone differently.
Atari had a truly amazing laser printer and with friend we managed to drive it from the Mac emulator via the Mac HP printer driver yielding an amazing quality 300dpi print for a relatively low budget.
Anyways, something called "Aladin" got traded in schools. That's how I got mine :-)
One floppy to boot that thing. One floppy to boot System 6.x or later 7 from there, one floppy for MacPaint, Draw, Write, or whatever else. Ran rock-solid, depending on amount of RAM (1 MB at least, 4 excellent). With a HDD it morphed your ST into a slightly faster Mac.
Megamax C was a K&R style single-pass compiler that had libraries to access the special features of the Atari like the MIDI port.
I still wonder about this early era of computers that came after the C64.
What's the word for nostalgia about something you didn't actually get to experience back then?
Got a Mega 4 soon after they were launched, followed by a 1040STe at home that I upgraded to 4MB RAM.
Still have the SH204 but with a 40MB drive in it.
the original multiplayer first person shooter that would run over an ad-hoc midi ring network.
my first ever network program was a multiplayer math problem race game, written in gfa basic in the '80s. :)
very cool machine, with affordability that made it available for many. so much cool european software.
The F was for floppy drive.