I chose an ST because the Amiga was too expensive, the Mac didn't have colour and was very very expensive, and the PC was a wretched business-use-only text-only waste of desk space.
I had a 1040 STe. I rigged up a hard drive (the Atari ST had what was effectively a SCSI bus built in, it just needed a small adaptor board to adjust some signals). Installed MiNT (a multitasking operating system extension) and the GNU tools and was in developer heaven.
The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). It was also a leading light in the music industry: I had a copy of Cubase v1.0 (a DAW), which was available only on the ST with its built-in MIDI out and MIDI through ports.
Unfortunately the company was run by the Tramiel family so it didn't really stand a chance. Then a couple of hears ago a derecho destroyed the drive shed where I kept all my old computers and I lost my ST. No more Time Bandits.
The trio Amiga, ST and Macintosh all had music software, DTP and graphics, but I think they ruled one craft each:
The ST became the king of MIDI.
The Amiga was the queen of gfx and video.
Machintosh created and ruled the DTP revolution.
Still, they had so much in common. If the three companies had made one OS and all standardized on the Amiga chipset, they could have won over the IBM PC.
Of course, back then, they didn't know how the PC would crush them all, at that time the three thought they were each others biggest competitors.
It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple accelerated 2D graphics. It feels like a wasted opportunity.
And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.
It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking.
The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.
"Enforcer" did not provide full memory protection. It only protected the lower page of memory (which were used as lookup tables by the OS, example: address 4 which was the Amiga "Exec" base address), in addition to some unmapped areas of memory.
It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.
There is an interesting "History of the Amiga" article in Ars Technica [1], and the sense I got is that the Amiga didn't win out for non-technical reasons.
It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc.
It had preemptive multitasking when consumer windows was still stuck on cooperative technologies. Where one misbehaving application could crash the whole system.
Those 3 68000 based machines did ok against the PC until the 486 arrived. At that point all Motorola had was the 68030, and it wasn't enough progression. If the processor line had had more legs, then maybe Commodore and Atari could've remained competitive. I think they both did 68030 based machines, but it was too small a step.
It wasn't just the 486. It was SVGA and SoundBlaster cards making the Amiga and Atari multi-media capabilities mostly irrelevant. The 486 also made 386 machines very cheap, which obviously worsened the problem.
Even EGA was good enough for most people - and it was non-interlaced at 60Hz, much better than what Amigas could do back then. When VGA came out, it became clear the Amigas couldn't keep up with the ecosystem around the PC.
The original chip set (OCS), which debuted with the Amiga 1000 in 1985, could display 320 by 200 in four colors, or 640 by 400 in 16 colors, and the colors selected from a gamut of 4096. This is non-interlaced in 60 Hz. A PAL display would have higher vertical resolution in 50 Hz.
It could go up to 16 colors in high res or 32 in low res, but this could slow down other operations.
Any resolution with 400 pixel vertical scan on the Amiga was interlaced, no exceptions until too many years after the first OCS and ECS chipsets released.
and when the solutions did come they were burdoned by kludges necessary so as not to break backwards compatibility - and especially not to complicate life for the killer app of the platform at the non-gaming level, the video toaster, which was very tightly integrated with the Amigas interlaced video system.
Exactly what I was thinking of with respect to kludges necessary for backwards compatibility.
I think Commodore made one monitor that supported a bi-modal scan rate, and it was something like twice as expensive as the the regular Amiga monitor range. I also recall a somewhat exotic NEC 17" flat-face CRT monitor that was completely out of the question pricewise for almost anybody except institutions, that also could do it by virtue of having a continuously variable sync clock from 15 khz up to 45 or so.
My father, who currently doesn't know how to send a message via WhatsApp, was very presient (businesswise) in the 80s and had two Macs with a printer, and one 1040 STs with another printer on his printing shops.
Just now, after your comment, I realized how weird was to have a 1040 ST in a printing shop instead of only Macs. He was also lucky on having a few people deciding on the technical and cost side.
> The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh).
I actually worked in the DTP industry. I did both write and typeset books.
Everything professional and semi-professional was made on Macintosh. You'd enter a bookstore and easily 99%+ of the books and magazines were typeset on Mac.
I don't remember the Atari ST as having a particularly good or influential font story neither.
I mean: yup, I was typeseting my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets on my Amiga. Doesn't mean it was a revolution.
The Amiga also had some good DTP software (PageStream, Pro Page, ...) but Commodore not wanting to invest a dime in anything beyond the strictly necessary for a gaming machine (no hi res monitor included, no high bitrate audio, no MIDI interface, no stock harddisk, heck... not even a built in RTC chip! ...etc.) pretty much condemned it to fail although lots of software for other uses beside gaming was already there. The MIDI interface alone would have cost cents to Commodore to add; I built mine using parts salvaged from surplus boards, but parts were cheap and as there was demand I also made some money building and selling them as I did with parallel port audio samplers. Amiga users weren't just gamers or scene developers/musicians; many of them were professionals wanting more from their machine, but Commodore simply didn't care, and when PCs and consoles filled the gap they tanked.
I used to be (and still am) one of the biggest Amiga fans anyone is likely to encounter, but I have to concede that the Amiga's graphics architecture was ergonomically terrible for the vast majority of dtp work. Most people found working in the only native resolution really suitable for dtp, interlaced 640x400, to be intolerable to look at for even mildly extended periods of time. Things were even worse in europe, with the lower 50/25ihz vertical scan rates. The non-interlaced modes otoh had too low of a vertical resolution and the pixels were far too oversquare or rectangular to render many fonts accurately.
It took far too long to come up with effective solutions for this, and the ones that did exist, like the A2024 grayscale square-ish megapixel pixel display, noninterlaced, were too late and had too many compromises.
The Amiga had an uphill battle against the head start mac enjoyed ( and seemed, to the casual observer, rather naturally suited to with its crisp black and white display) in DTP to begin with, and without a native laser printing, a good scanning solution, enforcdd UI consistency through quickdraw and most of all adobe, there was never a reasonable chance that it would seriously challenge Apple in that market.
The unsuitability of a very visibly interlaced display to fine detail black and white layout work insured it would never be tolerated by people who had to work with such tools 8 hours a day.
Totally agree about the absence of a pennies per unit midi port as being a damnable error on Commodore's part; likely one of the main reasons the non-pc market was fatally fragmented three ways instead of a possibly manageable two, and gifting the ST (which was in all other respects an admirable me-too effort at best), a lifeline by which wedge itself into the nascent multimedia production market, which really would have been better off entirely associated with one or two platforms rather than two/three.
Another the reason the non-68k market was so fragmented was because of the internal politics and coup against Tramiel inside Commodore.
Atari Corp only existed (and produced a 68k) because of his departure. Along with some key engineers. The Atari ST is in large part Shiraz Shivji's design, after coming over from Commodore where he worked on various things including the C64 and one of the ill-fated "business" computers that CBM was making.
I'm not sure what Commodore would look like if the Tramiels had stayed, though. It may have imploded in other ways. And Commodore under him really didn't seem to get software/platforms/compatibility.
Also the ST didn't get placement inside studios just because of the MIDI ports. It was also because it was a) $cheap$ b) completely reliable solid timing [no multitasking helps there] c) had a fairly Mac-like GUI d) the top-notch paper white 640x400 (pretty good resolution for the time) monochrome monitor & mode.
It also wouldn't have done well in studios if it weren't for the German software scene and the development of Steinberg's Cubase and e-Magic's Notator. The ST was popular in Germany. Most of the really good software came out of there (see also Calamus DTP)
Gluing a MIDI port into the Amiga wouldn't necessarily had brought that set of happenstances to the Amiga.
It's true the ST had almost no presence in that market. The Tramiels I think wanted to get in there and really shake it up, but they made some mis-steps.
GDOS (part of GEM with proportional fonts etc) not shipping with the original machine was a huge mistake for one.
Still Calamus + the cheap Atari laser printer was a pretty amazing piece of DTP kid for the people who got it.
That and it was simple to just turn your ST into a Macintosh. But with higher resolution and slightly higher clock speed.
The profesional publishing revolution was on the Macintosh. I worked in that industry and I experienced it. The Apple LaserWriter was a proofer the size of a washing machine and cost more than a diamond engagement ring and it probably hung off a Mac II running A/UX and acting as a (Appletalk) network spooler. That's not the stuff of a desktop revolution.
The desktop publishing revolution came when average Joe Schmoe could whip off a (almost) professional-looking typeset zine on his home desktop computer. That was An Atari ST, and Atari SLM, and Calamus.
the pc were the best thing one could get that was not a commodore or a bootlegged import chiclet keyboard from the uk.
the amigas were considered just expensive game machines. the apples were an extremely expensive status symbol, and the you felt like a fool because there was no compatible peripheral anywhere.
> that's funny to read being from outside the usa.
Idk where outside the USA you are, but the IBM PC easily had the easiest time taking over the USA. Amiga and Atari were considered hobbyist computers while Macintosh constantly battled DOS until slowly fading to irrelevancy between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, not regaining real steam until Mac OS X 10.2-10.4.
The TI series was very common on the super low-end/hobbyist end, and Sinclair/Coco/Dendy/Timex/etc derivatives had negligible marketshare.
Different places offered vastly different experiences.
In Brazil we had mostly Sinclair, Apple II and TRS-80 (Model III and CoCo) clones and compatibles. PC clones were very expensive and only appeared later - and only became popular through smugglers, about the same time MSX 1.0 was introduced. I believe there was only one MSX 2 machine that was actually sold. Brands like Atari, Commodore and Apple were extremely rare. This was all because the military dictatorship reasoned, somewhat correctly, that in order to grow an indigenous industry, it'd need to prevent imports of small computers and heavily tax other segments.
Some more details about Brazil - all imports were banned at the time to deal with the external debt crises. What was special about micro and mini computers was that foreign companies were forbidden from making them locally and selling them (like the did with cars, electronic goods and many other products). So clones dominated the market completely.
The Sinclair and TRS-80 clones arrived in 1981, the Apple II in 1982 and the PC XT in 1983 (at the absurd cost of US$15K for a configuration that would be US$5K in the US. This dropped to around US$3K by late 1984 for a configuration of similar price as the US, so not the "many times more expensive" that most people remember). There were very few TRS Color Computer clones, a single Sinclair Spectrum and the single Macintosh clone was not never authorized (every computer launch had to be approved by the government). The two MSX officially arrived in 1985 but sales actually started in 1986. The PC AT clones only started selling in 1987 and 386 machines in 1989 - these were the longest delays of all. An even longer delay was in PC graphics, which were stuck at CGA from 1983 all the way to 1992 (with imports allowed there was a jump to VGA+Multisync).
With the exception of the Spectrum and Mac clones by companies that had invested heavily in their predecessors, nobody tried to copy machines with custom chips, so no Ataris, Commodore 64s, Amigas, etc. The Commodore Pet would have been easy to clone, but there was no preexisting market of contraband machines due to the awkwardness of lugging the built-in monitor.
After the reserved policy ended in 1991 a company called PCI do Amazonas brought the Amiga to Brazil and was officially still making the A1200 months after Commodore itself had shut down. So we did get one of the three 68000 machines, even if very late.
almost everyone and most companies bought grey market "imports from Paraguay". which were 1.5~3x the usa price for pc.
also there were two prominent cpu fabs (churning 8080 and 68k) that the usa managed to close, further digging there interval market into cheap clone territory with that joke that was the apple ii clone announcement in a fountain.
I wasn't arguing any other experiences. The person I responded to offered a perspective on the US computer scene that was inaccurate. I was simply correcting that perspective.
Atari and Amiga were equally popular in Germany and much more common than PCs when I grew up. The major difference was that Amigas were much more common for gaming and Ataris were largely work machines (music and DTP). In my experience both were actually much more common in Europe than in the US where Macs and IBM PCs were more common (I did an exchange year and didn't see one Amiga or Atari)
Confirm. Got myself an AtariST 520STM with 124SM, that small BW 11inch thingy.
Upgraded the RAM by self soldering. The PCs at the time were either much more expensive, or cheap clone trash with many compromises. And in general rather 'unsexy'. That thing lasted until somewhere in the mid-nineties, when I got weak and got a 486DX 25Mhz with 4MB RAM, some HDD, and a 15" Multisync when VOBIS advertised them for only 5000,- Deutschmarks. Which seemed indeed cheap, because anything comparable from the likes of IBM, Compaq, Zenith was between 15.000 to 20.000 at the time. Seemed because 4MB wasn't good enough for early BSD and Linux, so upgrade to 8MB. Oh, the sockets for L2-Cache on the mainboard and Tag-Ram were empty, another 'upgrade', at least no soldering necessary. Came with some cheap Trident SVGA with only 256KB Video Ram. Diamond Speedstar24 with Tseng ET4000 and 2MB please! And a 17" NEC Multisync while I'm at it. Sigh!
That still felt like a downgrade from that Atari ST in many aspects. Usability? DOS? Early Windows? Unix clones? UGH!
Sure, it had some oomph, but the ride wasn't smooth.
The Commodore Amiga was better at everything but the Atari ST had a MIDI port. I saw Atari ST used in music studio well into the 2000s and not for nostalgic purposes: they were silent. Back then ultra loud PCs (PCs were ultra loud back then) were an issue in music studios, so some kept using Atari ST way past they're prime.
I remember in the late 80s a neighbor's friend would bring his Korg synth and hook it up to my neighbor's Atari ST. That was quite something.
Another thing the ST had that the Amiga didn't was a port of FTL's Sundog: Frozen Legacy. One of the very best video games of that era. FWIW that little FTL studio then went on to make another incredible hit: Dungeon Master (best selling Atari ST game ever and an incredibly prescient video game).
For whatever reason Dungeon Master got ported to the Amiga but Sundog: Frozen Legacy never did.
The monochrome monitor & mode was way better for productivity than interlaced Amiga high res.
MS-DOS compatible floppies.
Price. By far.
In any case I don't see them as directly comparable machines. The ST was made to be a cheap Macintosh or PC competitor ("Jackintosh"). Not a multimedia games machine. It wasn't terribly great at games, but it was a great productivity (and MIDI as you say) machine.
In the UK, the Atari ST was originally £299 while the Amiga was £499, so it's not really fair to compare the two. I was able to save up for an ST with various weekend and school holiday jobs, but there's no way I could have saved up for an Amiga (and the only classmates I knew with Amigas had their parents buy it for them).
Exactly. At 13 or 14 I got a used 520STfm + mono monitor with my own hard-earned cash from returning bottles to the bottle recycling repo and other chores. Amiga 1000 + monitor was basically double. There's no way I could afford it. For me the choice was Atari ST or Commodore C128 (which I was set to buy until I learned about the ST)
Amiga 500 evened things out a little bit, but it was still a step up.
Price per mhz/MB was better than anything else out there.
• single-floppy operation (because the OS was in ROM)
• being useful for productivity with only 1/2MB RAM (ROM again)
• being more affordable until a price war that killed both companies
Me, I owned an Acorn Archimedes. But I used them all.
A single-floppy Mac or Amiga was a massive PITA to use. More RAM helped but didn't cure it. Until adding a hard disk didn't triple the price (end of the 1980s, early 1990s) you needed dual floppies for Mac or Amiga. ST was... OK with one.
One thing in the STs favour was that it's core processor was clocked slightly faster. It needed to be because it didn't have the coprocessors for memory copies and sound that the Amiga had. However, if those processors weren't useful for the task, the ST would be a little quicker.
This manifested in 3D games where the processor did all the rasterisation. If the Amiga could bring it's blitter to bare, it won every time. If not, the ST would squeak it.
The approach the ST took with the original "Shifter" chip of just doing video as memory mapped raw bitmap barely squeaked out for games. Frame rates were pretty bad. 8mhz 68000 and that bus speed wasn't responsive enough to really kick it. That era still really needed dedicated blit HW support. (As the Amiga showed). But that approach only really mattered until clock speeds went up and memory became slower than CPU speed.
It's a shame the Blitter chip that came with the STe never shipped with the original ST (wasn't ready in time) and just never really got large market penetration after that. It was actually a decent design.
The STe feature-wise is quite competitive with the Amiga overall, while keeping the simplicity of the ST's architecture. There just wasn't enough of them shipped for software houses to bother making games that used it.
That, and I have a couple Atari Falcon 030s here, and they're really amazing. They really nailed it with that machine, before packing it in.
Better (and very good) video modes, amazing sound, onboard 56k DSP chip & S/PDIF audio, both IDE & SCSI drive support, 68030 processor, up to 14MB RAM.
Oh yes, I sat in front of a small Grundig TV, with a Data Becker book full of bug ridden code trying to learn C. I needed to swap disks three times for each compilation on an Amiga 500.
I had Amigas from around 1989 (starting with an A500) through 1994 (A3000.) The system stability improved incredibly with OS 2.0.
However, fundamentally, there were problems that could not be fixed. The entire OS was based on shared memory and message passing based on pointers. Tasks (processes) would read/write each others memory all the time. There was basically no way to implement memory protection without breaking all compatibility.
Exactly this. As much derided as the ST's OS is by Amiga fans, in actuality its fundamental architecture had more potential for future improvement than the Amiga's, though that never happened (in the mainstream, there's now FreeMiNT and friends).
Why? Because it implemented syscalls through proper TRAPs, for one. While the actual implementation of the core OS wasn't multitasking or even have re-entrant syscalls, others came along and made it so (MiNT, etc) while retaining syscall compatibility. And the thing can be made to use memory protection, etc. even.
The problem with the whole Amiga package is that it was brilliant for 1985, but extremely dated for the mid-90s and the reliance on the custom chips arch there just really couldn't evolve well.
You could do cooperative multitasking on the ST by compiling apps as GEM desk accessories, I modified MicroGNU Emacs so that I could have it running alongside other things.
I'll guess your friend had the Korg Wavestation, which would sync to midi clock.
Additionally, we would independently set off two 1040s and they would stay in sync all night.
One of the first cracks for the atari was the "Mike Hunt" 2.1 version of Cubase, a musical program, that is still going strong. I am now using a (paid for) version 13 on PC - which is why i won't convert to linux.
John Anderson wrote several articles a month for Creative Computing, particularly covering the Atari beat. He was a definite hero of mine as a kid. Sadly he was killed in this earthquake
Sad story. There’s a Wikipedia page for him which also remembers his colleague, Derek van Alstyne, who died alongside him, both caught by bad luck in a building collapse during the quake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Anderson
The Atari ST (for me, a 520 ST+) filled the gap between entertainment-centric home computers (Commodore C64) and PCs that could run Linux (some no-name with Intel i486DX-33), you could program it in so many languages (ST Basic, GFA Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, C, Forth etc.).
With a dream black/white monitor, this was a wonderful machine to improve one's programming skills on with structured programming and to do systems programming (TOS/GEM) on - it was the monitor and the available range of compilers that made me want an ST ASAP.
(At the same time, the Amiga had more powerful graphics hardware, but was very slow if you did not have a harddrive and "Kickstart ROMs", as it originally required two floppy disks to start up, not just one. The Amiga had a sophisticated OS but I always felt it was too demanding for the hardware it was running on.)
The ST for it's time was a good computer. It didn't gain the popularity that the Amiga and Mac did but it was a decent machine. Also the history of GEM could have its own article.
And unlike the ST or Mac or Amiga, its OS is still around, still FOSS, still actively maintained, and runs on modern bare-metal hardware, without emulation.
It has the advantage of running on ARM, which is still easy to obtain. I also think there are OSs for the Atari ST that are open-source and still maintained, but unfortunately, no 68K processors are easy to come by.
Aranym needed a ROM and the devs wrote a skeleton with most stuff stubbed out. This has led to a full scale ST TOS recreation, with the original's limitations: it's single-tasking and so on:
Yes but they were nowhere near as successful as the Atari ST or Amiga. They arrived kinda late to the party compared to the Amiga 1000 (1985) or Atari ST.
You'd occasionally see one but the personal computers scene in Europe was clearly dominated by the Atari ST and the Amiga. You'd also see a few Macintosh. The Archimedes has always been a rare sighting.
Yup, why I mentioned it. I first saw a mouse on an ST, triggering much desire compared to my Amstrad CPC-464. The Amiga arrived and that was gorgeous. I would try draw the Porsche pic pixel by pixel (https://imgur.com/gallery/jim-sachs-porsche-on-amiga-OMc99EB) on my own hand-crafted drawing program but the Amstrad has a tough time of it. Finally later got an Amiga 500. Never saw an Archimedes outside of magazines but the talk of RISC was intriguing.
Called Schneider in Germany. I never could afford the disk drive unfortunately. That used 3" CF2 disks a format that nobody knows about any longer (arguably superior to the 5 1/4 disks used by the C64 which was the main competitor).
Only for Amiga fans with a complex of some kind. I was a member of a local Atari users group and none of us were comparing to the Amiga? Mac and PC were the competitors because most of us were interested in productivity software and the like. Many were running Mac emulation on the ST and the biggest uses were MIDI sequencers and DTP.
Amiga was just something else. Impressive achievement, certainly. But for what it was I had no need to pay that kind of extra $$ just to play games better.
Funny, I plugged my ST back in today and then there's an ST article linked here.
I never had one back in the day (in fact I wasn't even alive yet), but became aware of it when my interest in the demo scene and chip music started in my teens. The ST's sound chip, the YM2149 - an antiquated PSG based design, was of course made fun of back in the day by Amiga and even C64 owners. But ironically something about the sound it makes spoke to me and I had to get one. The history of the ST demoscene is quite interesting to explore chronologically, seeing the hardware get pushed past it's boundaries time and time again as the years went on, and the rivalry with the Amiga scene is fun.
Recently I've been doing some retro coding on it for fun, setting up okami shell, MicroEMACS, and a sort of make wrapper [1] for the Pure C compiler, using some available C libraries to make a little curses-like SNDH player for myself. Of course using a cross-compiler on a PC would be simpler but where's the fun in that?
My first encounter with an Atari ST was when I visited a recording studio as a kid. They were in the middle of a recording session, and I asked if I can play with the Atari while they were doing that. "No, you see, we are running the whole recording session with this Atari..."
There was a company that sold an external card with a patched MacOS. To prevent people copying their prom with an eprom programmer and a generic eprom card they switched lines on the data bus.
Atari had a truly amazing laser printer and with friend we managed to drive it from the Mac emulator via the Mac HP printer driver yielding an amazing quality 300dpi print for a relatively low budget.
That prevention didn't work out. I also remember at least two different products from different vendors.
Anyways, something called "Aladin" got traded in schools. That's how I got mine :-)
One floppy to boot that thing. One floppy to boot System 6.x or later 7 from there, one floppy for MacPaint, Draw, Write, or whatever else. Ran rock-solid, depending on amount of RAM (1 MB at least, 4 excellent). With a HDD it morphed your ST into a slightly faster Mac.
I bought a 1040ST not long after they came out in 1986. I got the system unit, the color monitor, a mouse, GEM/TOS disks, and that was it for about $1500. Software titles were scarce but I was eventually able to pick up the Megamax C compiler. To be effective with it you needed to have a second floppy drive or the pricey SH204 20 Megabyte (yes, megs!) external hard drive.
Megamax C was a K&R style single-pass compiler that had libraries to access the special features of the Atari like the MIDI port.
I think I missed some of this in my youth, going from the Commodore 64 straight to a PC XT clone. Monochrome Hercules graphics, but I still coded my first games in it (using GW Basic).
I still wonder about this early era of computers that came after the C64.
What's the word for nostalgia about something you didn't actually get to experience back then?
I had a 1040 STe. I rigged up a hard drive (the Atari ST had what was effectively a SCSI bus built in, it just needed a small adaptor board to adjust some signals). Installed MiNT (a multitasking operating system extension) and the GNU tools and was in developer heaven.
The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). It was also a leading light in the music industry: I had a copy of Cubase v1.0 (a DAW), which was available only on the ST with its built-in MIDI out and MIDI through ports.
Unfortunately the company was run by the Tramiel family so it didn't really stand a chance. Then a couple of hears ago a derecho destroyed the drive shed where I kept all my old computers and I lost my ST. No more Time Bandits.