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Inside the 1040ST

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Re: Inside the 1040ST

#81

Post by j45 »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #66
j45 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. It was like visiting the future a little early. The IBM XT it sat next to looked depressing in comparison. And there has never been a game like Revenge of the Mutant Camels since. Or a tweener that was as simple and powerful as the one I used then. And.. I think I’m off to go look for an emulator.

There were also plenty of drawing apps, very sophisticated for that time, a poor man's mac, i've heard it being called.

It was more of a poor man’s Amiga.

It was as capable or more capable than the original Macintosh gui.

If Atari had broken through in North America like they had in Europe as business machines tech adoption would have progressed quickly.

I was randomly lucky that my Canadian 7th grade computer lab was full of them, when everyone else was in the stone ages on IBM XTs. There was a Original Mac lab too and those were archaic in comparison.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#82

Post by wkearney99 »

I had the occasion to have worked with some Apple ][ units first and found the Atari setups lacking. Terrible keyboard was an immediate put-off, though not nearly as horrid as the square chiclets on the Commodore PET. By the time they got around to better keyboards (though still no decent I/O expansion) the market had already moved on.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#83

Post by snvzz »

lproven wrote: post #77
snvzz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping. Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Much more of it even (256KB ROM).

> Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous. It has Kickstart in ROM. That is, broadly, the bootloader. All the rest is loaded in from floppy. The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago. With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop. You can…

>Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous.

Uh, I own six, and disagree, profoundly.

>It has Kickstart in ROM.

That's the name of the ROM images, yes.

>That is, broadly, the bootloader.

This is not just "broad", but outright wrong.

The ROM contains, e.g.:

* exec library (kernel)

* graphics.library (display routines)

* intuition.library (windows and menus)

* amigashell (the CLI shell)

* workbench.library (literally, the Workbench)

dos.library, input.device, FastFileSystem and so on.

And, in 2.0+ ROMs, it even contains a bunch of shell commands (dir, echo etc) that reside in sys:c on older ROMs.

What's loaded from disk is your user programs and your data, besides any other libraries you might need (like diskfont.library, which is used to load fonts from disk, if you don't like the ROM provided one).

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#84

Post by snvzz »

lproven wrote: post #77
snvzz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping. Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Much more of it even (256KB ROM).

> Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous. It has Kickstart in ROM. That is, broadly, the bootloader. All the rest is loaded in from floppy. The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago. With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop. You can…

>With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop.

Correct. It's a little more direct than the Amiga.

With the Amiga, you need two extra steps:

- Initialize dos.library (which is in the rom). This is done by the bootblock of the floppy you boot from.

- loadwb command (starts workbench, which again resides in the ROM)

>The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.

This is not how I remember the Amiga.

Due to dynamic library support, LIBS: is the library path, assigned to SYS:Libs by default, where SYS: is the filesystem you booted from.

Thus, if you booted with your workbench floppy then loaded a program from another floppy, it'd keep requesting to insert workbench: back every time it needs a dynamic library. (or font, or printer driver...)

The workaround, if you knew how to use your Amiga, would have been to assign the program's floppy as the first in the list for libraries, preventing this.

But, generally, you'd boot with the program's disk, to use a specific program, that is easiest.

Re: Inside the 1040ST

#87

Post by OnlyMortal »

lokedhs wrote: post #76
OnlyMortal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was no FPU for the 68000. This was supported by the 68010, which was not present in any Atari computers. Are you sure he didn't add it for the Falcon, which did have a slot for an FPU.

He had a straight 512ST and added manually a FPU. He bought some board to do that.
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