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Dutch legend has been running his campsite since 1986 using an Atari ST:
If there's one thing YouTuber Viktor Bart likes, it's retro computers: his channel is dedicated to videos about building old machines, their functions, cool oddities, and just generally the joy of these beige things. Even Mr. Bart, however, was surprised by what he found in Koningsbosch, in the Dutch province of Limburg: a campsite that's been run since 1986 on an Atari ST.
[Ed note: Is there anybody here who has an Atari ST? Please share your experience in the comments.
I bought its predecessor, an Atari 800, in 1980. Even got an expansion cartridge to boost memory from the on-board 8 KB RAM. Yes, I spent countless hours playing Star Raiders. It was not as capable as the Atari ST, but it was a fun system that booted up instantly!]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lentilla on Monday October 04 2021, @12:27AM (3 children)
I used an Atari 1024STe in the 1992/1994 period, mainly for music production. It had dedicated MIDI ports. You could put the Atari down on the desk, plug in the power, the monitor and your stack of MIDI equipment and you were ready to rock. To this day, nothing comes close to its simplicity and reliability for sound production. We may be able to do multi-channel at ten times the bit-rate, but nothing yet compares to my level of trust that the Atari would perform exactly as expected when required.
That being said, when someone kicked the power cable out, the machine would take a solid ten minutes to load the software from floppy (I never got to use an Atari with a hard disk). To put that into perspective, 1994 was the year I saw my first gigabyte hard disk - a SCSI unit connected to a digital audio recorder that probably cost as much as a decent used car.
Those Ataris were also "blessed" with a dongle slot.
GEM was an absolute dog of an operating system. It somehow managed to combine the worst features of an operating system with the worst features of a graphical environment. You had to use the mouse. Everything was made needlessly complicated. And it was ugly.
My other prevailing memory of the Atari 1024STe was the keyboard. It felt like you were typing into a sponge and it sapped the energy right out of your fingers. It wasn't sweet as the Apple IIe or snappy like the IBM Model-M, but fluffy and horrible. I'm glad I never had to type an essay on that machine.
Debian has a emulator called hatari. (And now I will be humming Henry Mancini's _Baby Elephant Walk_ from the film Hatari! for the rest of the day!)
I do not miss the days of single-tasking, clunky computers and the constant sound of floppy drives chugging away. I am glad I saw that era because whenever I sit down at my computer, I simply flick the mouse and I am ready to work, connected to the greatest collection of human knowledge ever assembled... an I briefly remember how far we have come.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 04 2021, @01:25AM (1 child)
Interesting story about the 1MB Atari ST, this was created in Europe, possibly Germany, and sold at the time as the "Mega ST". Got back to the US after seeing it all over the place and couldn't see it for sale in the US at all. Called Atari US and they'd never heard of it, "we don't make a 1MB ST". They eventually released an equivalent in the US as the 1040ST, which was different from the German(?) Mega ST. It was quite a surprise to me at the time that something that seemed to be everywhere in Europe didn't even exist in the US where Atari was based, and that Atari US, or at least their customer support people, seemed to have no knowledge of it.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 04 2021, @01:34AM
Just re-read the story:
He could well have bought the 1MB ST in 1985 because it would have been the German(?) version that Atari US didn't know existed. OTOH I remember the branding as "Mega ST" not "1040 ST" and from the video the badge says "1040 ST", so who knows...
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday October 04 2021, @02:26AM
The keyboard is indeed a spongy mess. The mega detachable keyboard was at least a bit better.
Gem: If you loaded TurboST it replaced the code for some of the OS graphics routines for a significant performance boost. Not perfect, but no longer too annoying.