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An Atari 1040ST. Another check-in to the retirement home.

Nice, every vintage computer collector should have at least one Atari ST model!

And I believe that the STFM was the model most people had if they had an Atari ST. I personally like the Mega ST (or Mega STE) better.

And that crazy idea Atari had when they made the models with the joystick-ports underneath the front of the keyboard... What's up with that? It makes it real hard to change between a mouse and a second joystick.

BTW, I think I have a spare user manual if your interested? And I might have some more Atari ST related things laying about. Send a PM if you're interested.

// Z
 
I have a STF its a nice machine, have been looking for the newer and rarer STE a while (4MB onboard, stereo sound).

The ST had better games then the Amiga early on untill the Amiga programmers figured out the custom chips and quit porting ST games over.
 
Excellent acquisition there Tez - I'm green with envy.
Back in 'those 80's days' - late 80's - I couldn't afford a PC but wanted to go 'somewhere' after using a C64 for many years. I finally settled on choosing between an Atari ST and an Amiga. Money was tight then and they had a sale on Amiga 600's. I bought one for $200. or maybe it was a bit less, can't quite recall the price. This kind of proved disastrous to me . . . Got a minute? Let me explain;
I bought the Amiga 600 and couldn't find any cheap software for it. I was spoiled from my C64 days of tons of cheap software. I finally ended up buying software through a catalog and subscribing to Amiga Format disk magazine. Anyway, I could never quite get a handle on the whole operating business of the Amiga system. I had used GEOS for the C64 for years but this desktop was quite weird to me. As I recall I bought a program called True BASIC for the Amiga 600 but even getting that fired up was a hassle.
It seems to me that there are basically two schools. People that like Z80 based (TRS80, etc.), and DOS through to MS Windows - - and the school of Amiga progressing on through Apple Macs. I, personally never had a MAC and know nothing of it's OS. But I now wish I had bought the Atari ST instead of the Amiga. I gave the Amiga away a few years back. I never did like the thing with it's noisy floppy drive and mine had no hard drive.
Does anybody agree with me about this - 2 schools?
Z80 through to Windows OR Amiga through to MACS. Just curious:)
I really am kind of intimidated by MACS. I doubt I could navigate the machine at all:) I've been 'doing' computers since 1978 and yet never touched a MAC keyboard in my life. It's kind of like the old FORD - CHEVY debate. Some people are dyed in the wool Chevy addicts and others are ALL Ford. I hold nothing against MACS - I just don't know a thing about their OS.
 
Vint said:
Does anybody agree with me about this - 2 schools?
Z80 through to Windows OR Amiga through to MACS. Just curious:)
Click to expand...

I'm certainly one who went through the Z80 ---> MSDOS ---> Windows path. I did know people who had Macs and Amigas of course, but I never really seriously played with them until I started this vintage collection. And even now, I haven't got to grips with them to any degree.

I must admit, starting with Z80 machines and dabbling with assembly language you did feel like you were close the metal so to speak. Even with MS-DOS, you felt you kind of know what was happening as far as file types, file organisation and what the OS was doing. Even Windows machines I understand in some amount of depth, but this could just be familiarity.

With the Macs, I haven't got a handle on the OS at all. I'm just not familiar enough with them. Certainly you don't have to learn all that stuff to use a older GUI/based machine productively, but the innards seem well hidden. An exception is the Amiga which does have a command line interface (if you want it) which looks almost unix-like from my very brief look at it.

Tez
 
Vint said:
But I now wish I had bought the Atari ST instead of the Amiga. I gave the Amiga away a few years back. I never did like the thing with it's noisy floppy drive and mine had no hard drive.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is one thing I don't like about the Amiga 500, and what I do like about the 1040ST. Neither have a hard drive but Workbench on the Amiga takes a while to load (it's slow) and, as it's not in ROM, you really need two floppy drives, one for the OS and GUI, the other for programs/data. So with the Amiga 500 you really DO need an external floppy drive which adds to the clutter.

Still, I do read that the Amiga has a superior chipset for multimedia so I guess there are pros and cons, and it depends just what you want.
 
Ah yes the Amiga CLI. I kind of remember that now, Tez.
It was a pain, I thought. Later when I went to PC's, using DOS and playing with Autoexec.bat and Config.sys was actually fun. Batch files were pretty nifty files and it was neat seeing the things you could accomplish in DOS with them.
But that Amiga CLI - just not my cup of tea I guess:)

I note you 'dabbled' with assembly. I bought a couple books about machine and assembly language but didn't have the fortitude to follow through on any of it. Always envied those who did. I stuck with BASIC. I spent all my spare time back in 1978 with the TRS80 Level II book learning all about BASIC. I still get a kick out of BASIC programming. I used to really pour over the magazines of the time. Kilobaud, 80 Microcomputing, Creative Computing - in fact I just bought some vintage Creative Computing mags from the Vintage Computer Marketplace that Erik had for sale. It sure will be fun browsing through those articles once again:)

Amiga note:
I never had a 2nd floppy - so yes it was a hassle working with only 1 drive, like you say, Tez.
 
Good find! I'm as green with envy as the 1040ST desktop screen. After finding STEEM a few years ago I've had a yearning to aquire an ST.
I have GEM/3 Desktop for DOS, never used and still sealed. Some day I'm gonna install it on one of the DOS computers.
 
Vint said:
Back in [..] late 80's [..] Amiga 600's
Click to expand...
Impossible, the Amiga 600 wasn't released until 1991 or even 1992. You probably think of the Amiga 500.

As for your question on CPUs and operating systems, I went C64 - Amiga - PC for practical purposes. I could never justify, even less afford a Macintosh and even today I wouldn't buy one even though their pricing has come down closer to other branded PCs.

I'm not sure why an Amiga is more noisy than than Atari ST as the floppy drive mechanisms tends to be identical. Probably it is the way the respective computers read and access the drive that causes the noise. But you could create slip-streamed boot floppies which load Workbench faster than the default one would. I never owned a 512K Amiga, but on the 1 MB ones, one gets by quite well with only the internal drive. The only time I really had use for an external drive was when I was developing in C, using a compiler meant to be installed on hard drive. It kind of worked to run it from a two floppy system, but it was tight.
 
There was always a strong rivallry between Amiga and ST enthusiasts. Each claiming ascendency over the others, each claiming they were first first off the assembly line. I was an ST guy, and a former musician, so the popularity of the Atari ST among musicians, partly fueled by the inclusion of the stock midi ports influenced me. That meant you didn't need a , at that time expensive, midi adapter and music programmers flocked to the platform, so there were a multitude of music programs available. Steinberg Cubase, Logic Audio's Notator, Cakewalk, and Dr.T. All originated on the ST(later ported to PC and Macs) and In Europe the STs were king. Widely used by professional musicians right up to the Falcon having direct to drive capability (which incidentally Next also included as stock). In the US the ST was less influential but we've all listened to records using them, from Loggins and Messina to Donny Osmond. There is still a large community of ST musicians many who now run their old ST programs on "STEem", an STe emulator.

Altho the ST, Mac, Amiga (and Next) were all Motorola machines, Sam Tramiel based the ST on DR's Gem GUI and PC compatible OS. The ST desktop is clearly an upgraded Gem. STs can read a MSDOS data disk with no problem and for some reason escaped Apple's suit against DR prohibiting the Trash bin and eventually crippled DR's Gem. Hence setting the stage for MS' Windows emergence.

While the Amiga has many similiarities with the Mac it was clearly a different OS. It's strength was in it's graphics, like the Mac, and in many ways was a better graphics computer than the Mac. The development of the Toaster established it's multimedia credentials. It never really, (like the Next) lived up to it's potental, faced with the capital of the MSDOS and Apple behemoths.

Strangely enough, like the earlier posters, I've never felt quite comfortable with either, and their graphics for that matter, which all claim are superior, reinforced by their use in the graphics and Art communities. I do have numerous Amiga and Mac computers so it isn't only lack of famliarity. Possibly because of my earlier usage of DOS-Type platforms.

I'm not sure how the CoCo would fit in all this. The 8580 and z-80 platforms to me were also much different machines.

Lawrence
 
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carlsson said:
Impossible, the Amiga 600 wasn't released until 1991 or even 1992. . .
Click to expand...

You are right there Carlsson about when the Amiga 600 was introduced.

I got my years mixed up a bit, forgive me. Let me think out load here a moment . . . I had a C64 from 1984 - 1994.
I bought my 1st PC in 1993 so it was just before that, that I had an Amiga 600. I must have bought it in 1992. Once I got my first PC, I totally stopped using both the C64 and Amiga 600. I sold the C64 in '94 but kept the Amiga around for a bunch of years then gave it away. There, I think I have my years straight now :)
 
Vint said:
I note you 'dabbled' with assembly. I bought a couple books about machine and assembly language but didn't have the fortitude to follow through on any of it. Always envied those who did. I stuck with BASIC. I spent all my spare time back in 1978 with the TRS80 Level II book learning all about BASIC. I still get a kick out of BASIC programming.
Click to expand...

Yes, when I say dabbled I meant dabbled in shallow water. I was forced to, because my System 80 wasn't completely compatible with the TRS-80 model 1 and a few things (Scripsit for example) had to be patched to make it fully functional. I did work through Hubert S. Howe Jr.'s book though
(see http://classic-computers.org.nz/system-80/literature_books.htm#TRS-80 Assembly Language) and this gave me a working knowledge...

...which I've now almost completely forgotten!! lol

I too enjoyed BASIC and wrote a number of programs in many dialects (BASICA, QuickBASIC, TurboBASIC) to assist me in my teaching job, also learning PASCAL (Turbo-Pascal) and also the rudiments of Visual Basic.

Nowadays I leave it to the professionals. I still enjoy the nostalgic simplicity of good old 8-bit BASIC though.

Tez
 
It's cool, Vint. I just get excited when people misremember details that could lead to confusion later on. I bought an Amiga 500+ on April 22nd, 1992 (still have the receipt, although I've traded away the computer and saw it sell again just recently). The Amiga 600 had just been released at a similar price tag. Technically the two were almost identical. The 600 has a PCMCIA slot and IDE option for 2.5" HDD, while the 500+ was partly backwards compatible with the original 500, had a larger keyboard and so.

I also see that I had to service the Amiga as soon as June 23rd the same year. After two months of use, the 8520 CIA and a 5719 Gary chips had broken. Hm. At that time I didn't have any funky hardware that could've killed the CIA, unless it broke when I inserted a joystick.
 
Vint said:
Does anybody agree with me about this - 2 schools?
Z80 through to Windows OR Amiga through to MACS. Just curious:)
Click to expand...
Maybe some people might fit that profile, but I'm not one of them.

I cut my teeth on 6502 based machines - the Vic 20 & Atari 400.

My brother and I were then given an Amstrad 2286, and I not long after discovered the Amiga, but also toyed around a lot with Apple Macs at the time, which gave me my first taste of emulation (A Mac LC II with an Apple IIe card and 5.25" disk drive) and then decided that I wanted a machine that could run as much software as possible - regardless of which platform it was for.

The Amiga series fitted that scenario nicely, seeing as it could emulate the C64 (through software), Macintosh (hardware for the Mac ROM, and software to make use of the Amigas 680x0 CPU), IBM Compatible (various hardware boards right up to the 486), and pretty much anything else that a programmer decided they wanted it to be able to emulate.

The fact that it could do all that (if you had the right hardware and software, obviously a "big box" Amiga was more suitable, such as an A2000/A3000/A4000, which also gave you ISA slots that could be used if you had a PC emulator card, aka bridgeboard), combined with the powerful operating system (multitasking, the wonderful Amiga version of Rexx called ARexx for interprocess communication, the flexability, simplicity and seemingly limitless power), and I was sold!

So while I always had a soft spot for the Mac (and still do), when I'd saved up my pocket money I went straight for an Amiga 1200HD, complete with 40Mb Hard disk and 1084S monitor. It was blazingly fast compared to the Amstrad 2286 most of the time, with Syndicate running a heck of a lot better on the 1200 then the 2286, although because of poor programming for the Amiga port, Civilisation was the opposite. I eventually expanded the RAM so it had 10Mb total (9Mb more then the 2286) and realised my goal of running PC, Mac and C64 software all on the one machine, all at the same time, once PC-Task and Shapeshifter were released and I got my grubby mitts on a real physical Apple Mac ROM and the ROM image of it. Sure, PC emulation via software on a 14MHz 68ec020 of a 8086 was SLOW, working at about 3MHz at best, but it worked, and the Mac was emulated at full speed, although colour slowed it down a fair bit due to the very different colour screen architecture between the Amiga and Mac (chunky pixels vs planar).

I stuck with the Amiga for a long time, selling the A1200 and upgrading to a A4000/040 while also eventually getting myself a 486 with Win95, but more and more I found myself using the PC rather then the Amiga, because there were things the PC did that the Amiga couldn't do, although there were also some things I still preferred to use the Amiga for, such as artistic fun in Photogenics, DPaint or PPaint.

The floppy drive on the A4000/040 stopped working, but that didn't bother me because I had upgraded to the joys of CD-ROM. But then, disaster struck. The poor old heavily abused 120Mb Seagate drive in the A4000 started sticking, at first requiring a gentle tap when the machine was turned on, but eventually not spinning up at all. Before that happened, I copied across the entire contents to my PC via a serial connection (sadly all lost now seeing as the machine that had that backup on it was stolen late last year while I was away for Christmas), but I was still stuck with an A4000 that was (and still is) for all intents and purposes, dead. While I could easily replace the hard drive with another one after installing it in my PC and installing Workbench and other applications, I have no idea where the A4000s keyboard has gone - probably stolen as well.

So while I still have my beloved A4000/040, with it's 18Mb RAM, 68040 CPU, SCSI plus RAM card, 8088 bridgeboard, as it's incomplete I can't use it. Yet I still can't bear to part with it, as I'm sure many of you here would be able to understand, and would still love to one day get her up and running again with the addition of a nice graphics card, biggish hard drive CPU upgrade (PPC 603 and faster 68040 or 68060 would be nice) and network card, although I fear that will always be a dream, and perhaps it's something best left as a dream to avoid disenchantment. In the mean time, Amiga emulation via WinUAE provides me with my Amiga fix when I need it, however it's a poor substitute for the real thing - even if it's many times faster then the real thing could ever hope to be.

Ok, I'll switch rant mode off now :D
 
TroyW said:
...Yet I still can't bear to part with it, as I'm sure many of you here would be able to understand, and would still love to one day get her up and running again with the addition of a nice graphics card, biggish hard drive CPU upgrade (PPC 603 and faster 68040 or 68060 would be nice) and network card, although I fear that will always be a dream, and perhaps it's something best left as a dream to avoid disenchantment. In the mean time, Amiga emulation via WinUAE provides me with my Amiga fix when I need it, however it's a poor substitute for the real thing - even if it's many times faster then the real thing could ever hope to be.
Click to expand...

Yea, i can relate...both to not wanting to throw out a beloved machine and that emulators, cool as they are, are just not quite the real thing.

The reason I started my System-80 tribute archive site (off the URL in my sig) was because I was about to throw all my Sys80 stuff out, and I wanted to preserve it's memory...probably more for myself than anything if truth be known. So I built the site. In the end, I couldn't bear to throw the gear out anyway, even after the site was up!

In retrospect, I'm very glad it didn't dispose of the computer as it's a significant unit in my collection.

You certainly can get attached to these things.

Tez
 
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