Atari ST/E emulator

Atari Is Shipping 520 ST Computer

Special to the New York Times

Published: July 10, 1985

SAN FRANCISCO, July 9— Atari Inc. has begun shipments of its 520 ST computer to distributors, a company official said. But it might take a week or so for the machines to reach dealers' shelves, according to James Copland, vice president of marketing, who added that Atari planned to ship ''well in excess of 25,000'' units in the next three or four weeks.

The machine's debut was originally scheduled for April. As late as last week, dealers were in the dark about when it would appear.

The 520 ST will sell for $800 with a monochrome monitor, 512,000 characters of internal memory, a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive as well as two computer languages, Basic and Logo. A version with a color monitor will sell for $1,000.

Inside the Atari 1040 STF

 Happy Birthday, Atari ST Series

 It may seem strange today, but there was a time when Atari made cutting-edge computers. That's right--the company sold modern computers with mice, MIDI inputs, hard drives, and high-resolution graphical user interfaces. Atari released the first member of this advanced computer series, the Atari520ST, 25 years ago.

To celebrate the anniversary of this often overlooked but still influential series of computers, let's take a peek inside the ST line's most prominent model, the Atari 1040STf. With 1MB of memory and a colorful interface, the 1040STf gave the Macintosh a run for its money.

Meet the 1040STf

Atari's first member of the ST line, the 520ST, relied on both an external power supply and a floppy drive. The 1040STf, shown here, integrated those two components into one case and upped the RAM to 1MB, launching for $999 in 1986 as a complete system with a base unit, a monochrome monitor, and a mouse.

The ST series ran a windowing system known as GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), developed by Digital Research. That, in turn, ran on top of an operating system called TOS (Total Operating System). But, as with a Mac, the user saw only a friendly graphical desktop--no command line here.

What Makes the ST Special

Just as the Macintosh platform quickly dominated the world of graphic design, the Atari ST found its strongest niche in music production. That's because Atari included two built-in MIDI ports with every ST shipped--a world first for mainstream PCs at the time.

MIDI allows electronic musical instruments to control one another, which meant that the ST could capture a performance, play it back, or generate a new one from scratch. Atari ST machines saw widespread use for audio-production work well into the late 1990s due to their stability and their excellent music software. A few studios still swear by them today.

Atari never fully utilized the ST's cartridge port (shown here), but third-party developers sometimes used it as a hardware expansion interface.

A Floppy View

The 1040STf shipped with a double-density, 720KB, 3.5-inch disk drive that--thanks to the similarities between the ST's underlying TOS operating system and MS-DOS--could read (but not write) IBM-format disks.

The last letter in the 1040STf name stands for "floppy," denoting the fact that the system shipped with a built-in floppy disk drive. Its predecessor, the 520ST, used an externally attached, 360KB, 3.5-inch floppy drive that increased cable clutter.

An Array of Ports

The 1040STf came equipped with an array of expansion ports along its right rear side. From left to right: a serial port (for use with modems), a parallel printer port, a hard-disk port, and an external-floppy-drive port (for a second floppy drive). The hard-disk port used the proprietary ACSI interface, an Atari-developed derivative of the common SCSI standard.

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 ... poglejmo kaj smo podalpski narodi pisali o seriji Atari ST. 

Tako je revija 'Moj Mikro' pisala v novemberski številki, ne-davnega leta 1985 o računalniku Atari ST ...

'Moj Mikro' Julij/Avgust 1988 o Atari Mega ST

Revija 'Svet Kompjutera' o Atari STE, december 1989

Atari Mega-STE in 'Svet kompjutera', april 1992

'Moj Mikro' in Atari Mega-STE, februar 1993

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Atari 520 ST

 

Atari 1040 ST

Atari 'everywhere'

Atari MegaST

Atari STE

Atari Mega STE

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About today's 'Fun' on today's Atari ST/STE 1

About today's 'Fun' on today's Atari ST/STE 2

... from 'Noć Muzeja' 2013 Serbia

Awesome Blog from 'AtariCrypt'
'ROCKABIT' Chiptune Music

Midi Music 1986

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 My Atari ST/E emulator Compilation is based on the Steem and Hatari engine.

STEEM: Atari 1040STFM only for Gaming with hundred's of Floppy images

               Atari STE with HDD for Gaming, Music and Demo's ...

             

HATARI: original virtual Replica of 16Mhz Atari Mega-STE with DMA-sound. Desktop experience version on Mono. More color and higher resolution are in progress ...
Atari Mega-ST with HDD for Desktop experience and App in Mono and resolution up to               1280*1024 res. on 32MHz CPU, 14-Mb-RAM, PSG sound.