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Inside the 1040ST

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Re: Inside the 1040ST

#31

Post by djmips »

danbmil99 wrote: post #13
thom wrote: post #11

Nothing but happy memories about this machine. My dad wrote books about programming microcomputers throughout the 80s so we were very lucky to grow up around a menagerie of machines, but somehow this one has the warmest place in my heart. I suppose I was even aware that it was inferior to the Amiga, but that did nothing to cheapen the hours I spent playing Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Player Manager and Xenon II (which…

Brings back memories -- I developed this hardware sync unit http://www.oldschooldaw.com/forums/index.php/topic,6763.0.ht...

Hat's off to you!

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#32

Post by bregma »

chiph wrote: post #4

My 1040ST was an earlier one. Not sure if it was a Rev D motherboard but it did have the 1mb of RAM along the front, under the keyboard. Atari wanted quite a lot of money for their external 3.5" floppy drive (so that you'd have two - one for your compiler and one for the source/target files). There was a magazine article about how to create a cable (the ST used a DIN connector for the 2nd floppy) so that a Radio Shac…

The proprietary port was actually SCSI in a non-standard format. There were readily-available conversion boards. I had a self-build external hard drive case with a (20 MB?) SCSI hard drive that let me boot up my ST to MiNT and run the GNU development tools. So close to Unix.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#33

Post by bregma »

FounderBurr wrote: post #20

Ah sweet memories of slamming it on the desk over and over to get it working due to mangy plcc sockets.

"Slamming" might be an exaggeration. The instructions were to hold it 3 inches above the desk and let it drop.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#34

Post by lproven »

alexisread wrote: post #18

A fantastic machine, could have been so much more though: TBH I think bigger impacts would have come from a few tweaks to the ST hardware: Autocad started life on the ST with the Cyber series of products - including a full expansion port as the cartridge port would allow for high-colour videocards, which the lack of forced them to migrate to other platforms. Similarly for DTP which was huge on the ST at launch. The A…

All excellent points.

It does seem to me that Atari did very well with the use of COTS hardware and software to get a usable machine out at such a low price. It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping.

But it did need both a lot more upgrades and expansions as time went on, as you point out, correctly IMHO. Secondly, I think Atari should have adopted PC standards as they appeared and settled: PS/2 ports, VGA and SVGA monitors and display modes, Baby AT motherboards, SIMM slots, IDE connectors, ISA slots and so on. Apple successfully adopted a lot of this stuff, so classic Macs had standard RAM slots, and the lower-end ones had IDE drives, and so on.

Things like PCI (1992), ATX motherboards and USB (1995) came along too late.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#35

Post by OnlyMortal »

earthbee wrote: post #8

"Some 3rd parties produced boards that could contain a Blitter chip, but I’m not aware of anyone directly adding one to the board." My 520ST was upgraded with 2.5MB of RAM and an added blitter chip, so it did happen. I still have the computer and it was still working the last time I powered it up a few years ago.

A school friend of mine added an fpu.

I’d lent him a Mac Plus with a copy of Excel on it. He was using it as a reference when writing his own spreadsheet.

He’d previously written one for the Spectrum called “TasCalc” and had done some GEM programming, a product he sold as “Proshare ST”.

It downloaded stock prices from Teletext via an adapter.

Smart lad.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#36

Post by Annatar »

bregma wrote: post #32
chiph wrote: post #4

My 1040ST was an earlier one. Not sure if it was a Rev D motherboard but it did have the 1mb of RAM along the front, under the keyboard. Atari wanted quite a lot of money for their external 3.5" floppy drive (so that you'd have two - one for your compiler and one for the source/target files). There was a magazine article about how to create a cable (the ST used a DIN connector for the 2nd floppy) so that a Radio Shac…

The proprietary port was actually SCSI in a non-standard format. There were readily-available conversion boards. I had a self-build external hard drive case with a (20 MB?) SCSI hard drive that let me boot up my ST to MiNT and run the GNU development tools. So close to Unix.

[dead]

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#40

Post by troymc »

I read the headline and thought, "Maybe the 1040ST is something like the IRS's income tax form 1040EZ, i.e. a variation on the standard US income tax form 1040. How exciting!"

Nope. If you filled one of these and sent it to the IRS, they would not be happy.

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