Programming the Atari ST 20 Years Later | Hacker News Reader

Programming the Atari ST 20 Years Later

voidbred.com

25 pointsdogprez14 comments

" A dark shadow falls over me when I think about all the hours of work spent by Atari ST engineers to build something almost lost to oblivion."

Sigh. There are sooooooooo many things people have built which are sitting there in "oblivion" now. One of the most awesome things of playing with turn of the century computers (like PDP 11's or VAXen) is that you can see the stuff they did, in the contraints they had, and really understand how amazingly inefficient/overpowered OSes are today. When you have only one font, its fixed width and size, and it comes out of a ROM you don't worry about typography for example.

Great point. One that pains me terribly.

Whilst not quite PDP11/VAX territory (I do love VAXstations though!), the killer for me was I bought a low end Sun Ultra 30 in 1999 just before they EOL'ed them and spent 3 years slowly upgrading it. Spent about 4000 GBP on it in total.

Still felt faster then than the i5 X201 ThinkPad on my lap today. Everything was smooth as butter, even though it was Solaris 2.6.

I can remember when using Mixed case in your Hollerith segments in Fortran was considered a bit flash :-)

I wrote an Atari ST emulator out of nostalgia called STonX myself when I started to use a Unix box (Sun IPC), I believe it was the first open source ST emulator ('94 or '95, also the first for Unix with big/little endian support, ran on Linux, DECstations with Ultrix, Sun/Solaris etc.). It was somewhat special in that it supported "native" graphics capabilities, i.e. bigger resolutions than 640x400 using VDI if the host hardware supported them. Had a bunch of bugs though that I never got round to fixing...

My memories of the ST were fond: it was quite powerful yet still a system that you could look into every aspect of, you could single-step through the OS in ROM if you wanted and there weren't dozens of strange tasks running all the time like today. When MiNT (Unix-like OS layer) was released, we could even play in the Unix league using gcc, bash, tcsh, emacs.

I learned basic on a atari 800 i got for christmas because our bundle included the cartridge. After about 6 months i managed to get my parents to buy me a tape drive so i wouldn't have to retype programs completely out each time.

I think my biggest day of my programming life was when i got an advanced book that showed me what gosub was for.

Sorry, but the Amiga was wayyyy better.

I believe it. I surprised myself playing with the Atari ST instead of the Amiga. The emulator for Atari ST seemed nice. Also while computers have surpassed the Atari ST and the Amiga in almost every front, the Atari ST is supposedly hard to beat even by today's standards when it comes to its MIDI latency.

Ah...a moment to reminisce about so many silly arguments.

FWIW, quite a few apps realized that they could actually change the 16 color palette multiple times during each line scan. Spectrum 512 famously used this to allow for, as the name suggests, 512 colors simultaneously.

I almost downvoted you just for being so wrong. :-)

An Atari ST was the first computer I ever owned.

I sent my father to the shops to buy a C64 and he was convinced by a salesman that what I really wanted was an ST.

Atari shortly after pulled out of Australia and I found myself paying $15 a month for copies of ST Format from England.

Seeing screenshots of the OS bring up some serious childhood flashbacks.

In 15 seconds you'll be using an Atari ST emulator -- http://estyjs.azurewebsites.net/

I don't remember the ST, but man, I wanted an Atari 800 with an Assembler Editor cartridge so bad back in the day!

Anybody interested in running their business off of a model undercutting competitors prices should study Jack Tramiel.

I don't know why his name doesn't come up more but he was a remarkable businessman.

Amiga rulez !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com