Inside the 1040ST

I have fond memories of my Atari 1040ST days, though not quite as fond as my 8-bit days. My use of the ST was at university for writing essays and playing Megaroids or Balance of Power. I guess that makes since I only had the Basic and Asteroids cartridges for my 8-bit Atari for almost a year.

Other than that, this was my first computer that could actually run compilers on, mostly the Megamax C compiler, or try alternate operating systems.

One thing that would have been cool would be the "Magic Sac" cartridge, that with Mac ROMs added would give you a 'Mac' with 1MB ram, 8MHz cpu, and 640 instead of 512 pixels across which is huge improvement in text layout for a letter sized page. At the same time, I liked having a less "liked by general folks" computer writing many fun but useless programs for GEM.

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 Shack 3.5" drive could be used, and it worked fine.

The really annoying part was their hard drive expansion port was proprietary (19 pin D-Sub connector), and wasn't SCSI. That really limited the available choices for mass storage.

Sadly, my 1040STf was one of the very early ones that had a single-sided drive, and the replacement drive I ended up with to be able to use double-sided disks never properly fitted inside the case, so the 1040ST had to spend it's life with half of the case removed.

I wish I still had it though.

"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.

I did my school work experience for Atari in Slough Uk which must have been in about 1988. I’m not sure what the office I worked in actually did, I think possibly orders/ dispatch, but they left me largely to my own devices to play around with an ST, which I would regularly brick by inadvertently deleting some essential system file or other, then work through my lunch break in a cold sweat to fix it before anyone found out.

In retrospect I suspect that they knew exactly what was going on and left me to it- which was probably the most valuable experience I could have had. If you’re out there, thanks:)

When the 2 week stint was up I transferred to work in goods out for a holiday job and bought a 1040 ST with the proceeds. They were awesome machines at the time.