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About the ST case, by Taneli Lukka:
Probably the worst feature of the new case
introduced with these machines and used with the rest of the ST-series and
the Falcon are the joystick/mouse ports. Even Amiga's ports which are
mounted on the back of the case can be a real pain in the butt when
different games/programs use different ports, but the ST's design is
really a creation of the devil: the ports are in a slot under the machine
just about where the numerical keypad is. Plugging controllers can be very
annoying especially if there are lots of peripherals mounted on the
machine and you have to turn it over. The connectors are also up-sidedown
which doesn't make the job easier at all. These ports were usually the
first connectors on the machine to fail. Using a mouse can also be
difficult because the wire comes out from the front of the machine.
Atari also made a pretty bad decision early in the machines life. They
decided to use single sided 360kb disk drives because DS drives were quite
expensive at the time. This meant that long after the introduction of the
DS drives games and programs were still released on two single sided disks
instead of one double sided one so that even the owners of the first
machines could buy them.
From Edd Scorpio:
A number of Juno & Grammy Award winning songs
were produced on Atari's - and used by artists like Madonna, Tangerine
Dream, Phillip Glass... and most recording studios. Ontario Hydro used to
use STes in their Nuclear Power Plants, and Toronto Hydro used them in
their accounting offices.
John Craker reports to us:
I sold these retail in the late 80's. Awesome
machine in it's day!
There was a ROM pack you could get for it that turned it into a Mac! Used
an actual Mac ROM in the pack, so with the 68000, you in effect had a real
Mac! There was also a PC emulator pack, but it was pathetic. I wouldn't
even try to sell one to anybody I knew.
Trey Yancy adds:
The ST had a set of expansion ports on the left
side, including MIDI ports and an EEPROM slot. Along with accepting
standard EEPROMs, a variety of dongles were created by third-parties, a
strandard size being approximately 2.5" x 7" with pass-throughs
for additional huge dongles.
Among them were C-Lab's (now Emagic) Creator and Notator
sequencers and UNITOR SMPTE/EBU sync unit, and an equally large
expansion dongle for inserting multiple standard EEPROMS. A full set of
such dongles could add 50% to the width of the ST!
Emulator package, by Mikael Sundström:
I used an emulator package made by a company called Gadgets by Small,
which turned the 1040 into a Mac. As the Atari was quite a bit cheaper,
and actually became 25 % faster than the comparable Macintosh at the time,
it was good value for money, and worked like a charm.
I always wondered what happened to that company: they sent out a funny
little newsletter to their family of customers, which was always an
interesting read.
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