Atari St History
The Atari ST was a home/personal computer system Released by Atari in 1985. The "ST" allegedly stood for "Sixteen/Thirty-two" which referred to the Motorola 68000's 32-bit internals with 16-bit external buses. Other theories say that ST really stood for "Sam Tramiel", the son of Atari owner Jack Tramiel. This is a plausible explanation, since the Atari ST also used a bumblebee as the busy mouse pointer image, which might be a reference to Jack's birth name.
The Atari ST was a typical second-generation home computer, based on the Motorola 68000 chip set, shipping with 1/2 a megabyte of RAM or more, and using 3.5" floppy disks as the normal storage medium. In these respects it was similar to a number of other contemporary machines, including the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga and, to some extent, the Acorn Archimedes.
Unlike these machines, the ST was based mostly on "off-the-shelf" parts, as opposed to the large number of custom VLSI chips used in most systems of the era. Disk drive support was provided by a standard Western Digital chip, sound by a clone of the common but fairly basic General Instruments AY-3-8910, and the single in-house design, the BLiTTER, was left out of most models.
Like the hardware, the operating system was likewise off-the-shelf, a slightly modified version of CP/M-68K and the GEM GUI known as TOS. TOS was fairly simplisitic, similar to early versions of Microsoft Windows in concept and appearance. Thrid-party operation systems addressed many of TOS's shortcomings, and over the years a number of newer versions of TOS were released that added better looking GUI elements and a simple co-operative multitasking system.
The Atari ST was a competitor to the Commodore Amiga systems. This platform rivalry was often reflected by the owners and was most prominent in the Demo Scene. Where the Amiga had custom hardware which gave it the edge in the games market, the ST was generally cheaper and slightly faster at basic operation. Thanks to its built-in MIDI ports enjoyed success as a music sequencer and controller of musical instruments. In some markets, particularly Germany, the machine gained a strong foothold as a small business machine for CAD and Desktop publishing work.
Atari had created two released machines in the form of the Atari 2600 console (also known as VCS) and the various Atari 8-bit based home computers. Both of these lines were created around the 6502 CPU and included a number of additional chips assisting this rather basic, but cost-effective CPU in providing graphics and sound. In fact the 8-bit machines had originally intended to be the replacement for the 2600, but they were later "re-purposed" as home computers to cash in on that market segment's much higher selling prices.
As Atari grew and the management was shuffled by Warner (their parent company), the creators of the 2600 and 8-bit machines eventually got fed up and left. A group of them led by Jay Miner formed a small think tank called Amiga and set about creating the third generation machine, this time based on the much more powerful 68000 CPU.
During this time, the home computer market started to slow down, and the video game market underwent the great video game crash of 1983. Warner management decided to "get out" and started looking to sell Atari outright. Meanwhile many of the same effects were in the process of decimating Commodore International, and eventually their board got fed up and fired Jack Tramiel in January of 1984. By May he had secured his funding, bought the remains of Atari from Warner for a very low price, and set about re-creating his empire.
Before Atari was sold, Atari were working towards the launch of a new computer based on the Amiga chipset. Amiga were desperate for a buyer or investor, and the "Warner owned" Atari had paid Amiga for development work. When Tramiel took over the company he tried to leverage this and take ownership of the Amiga properties.
Right under the noses of Atari, and at the 11th hour for Amiga, Commodore purchased Amiga lock, stock, and barrel. Tramiel was furious, and the resulting court case lasted for years. In the meantime this left Atari in the poor position of having no internal 16-bit design ready for production, while Commodore would soon have the best. In order to address this Tramiel continued development of a system that had started at Commodore. Shiraz Shivji was the key engineer on this project and had moved to Atari with Tramiel.
The result was the 520 ST. The machine went from concept to store shelves in a little under a year. As one might expect, it was built largely from off-the-shelf parts and thus had little of the finesse that was the hallmark of their earlier projects (or the Amiga). This was true of the operating system as well, which was a re-labelled version of Digital Research's CP/M-68K, largely compatible with the 8-bit version that had started the microcomputer market almost a decade earlier. Atari had originally intended to release versions with 128 KB and 256 KB of RAM as the 130 ST and 260 ST respectively, but the rapidly falling prices of RAM at the time led them to cancel these versions and it was released with 512K.
Atari machines under the Tramiel rule are marked by infamously "cheap" cases. The original 520 design was quite flimsy, and while the 1040 ST-style case was much stronger, it was also becoming too large and rather unwieldy. In addition the majority of the machines had very poor quality keyboards, so poor that there was a burgoning third-party market for spring kits to improve the feel. They got the design completely right with the Mega ST series which included a detached high-quality keyboard and stronger case, but this apparently cost too much to produce and the design was not used widely.
An annoying problem concerned the disk drives. Early models were shipped with an external single-sided drive that could store up to 360KB, with an optional double-sided version that stored 720KB for considerably more money. Due to the early sales of so many of the single-sided drives, almost all software would ship on two single-sided disks instead of a single double-sided one, in fear of cutting off all the other owners. This was true even years later, long after the single-sided drives had been taken off the market.
Additionally they had originally intended to include GEM's GDOS hardware abstraction layer, which allowed programs to draw (display, print, etc.) graphics to any supported device with no changes. This allowed developers to write a program for display to the screen, and get high quality printing "for free". However GDOS was not ready at the time the ST started shipping, and while Atari promised to include it as soon as possible, they never did. This left printing support up to the developers, who had to create their own engines for every possible printer. Similarly the custom "BLiTTER" was to be included to speed the performance of graphics operations on the screen, but this was isolated to their "upscale" machines when it was eventually released years later. As a result, the power of GEM was largely lost on the ST platform, even when GDOS and BLiTTER eventually shipped, it was ignored by developers because it was on so few machines. The STE models initially had serious operating systems conflicts resulting in many applications and games written for the ST line being unusable.
On the plus side the ST was less expensive than most machines, including Macintosh Plus, and tended to be faster than most. Largely as a result of the price/performance factor, the ST would go on to be a fairly big seller, notably in markets where the foreign exchange rates amplified prices. For this reason the ST was most popular in Europe, especially in Germany. Also, the very crisp, 640 by 400 pixels picture of its black & white; monitor made it popular for small-office applications. In fact, an Atari ST and reasonable terminal emulation software was much cheaper than a Digital VT220 terminal that was normally needed by offices with central computers.
Technical specifications
As originally released in the 520 ST:
CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8Mhz
RAM: 512KB
Sound: Yamaha YM2149
Drive: single-sided 3½" floppy disk drive
Ports: TV out (on FM models), MIDI In/Out, RS-232, Printer, Monitor (RGB and Mono), Extra Disk drive port, Joystick and Mouse ports
Operating System: TOS (Tramiel Operating System) with the GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) GUI
Display modes: 320×200 (16 colour), 640×200 (4 colour), 640×400 (mono), palette of 512 colours
Very early machines included the OS on a floppy disk, but this was quickly replaced with ROM versions instead. Another early addition (after about 6 months) was an RF Modulator that allowed the machine to be hooked to a colour TV when run in it low resolution mode. These models were known as the 520STm, although the m did not appear on the label.
