
Programming the Atari ST 20 Years Later - dogprez
http://www.voidbred.com/blog/2014/09/programming-the-atari-st-20-years-later/
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ChuckMcM
_" 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.

~~~
allegory
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.

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lazyjones
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.

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smilbandit
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.

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icedchai
Sorry, but the Amiga was wayyyy better.

~~~
dogprez
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.

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Fuzzwah
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.

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

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

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bane
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.

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rootuid
Amiga rulez !

