-The real Atari 8bit Computer Successor

[Mclaneinc]

 

Now that you mention the A1200... Somehow I feel like the Atari Falcon is a more worthy sucessor to the Amiga 500 than the 1200. The 1200 only had the upgraded AGA chipset. (ok, also the ide interface, I read somewhere Jay Miner would have liked to see scsi instead). The Falcon had 16-bit sound, 800x600, scsi2 and a nice DSP. Ok, I never had a Falcon so I can't really say it was good or bad (it had a 16-bit databus...).

 

My mate brought an Amiga A4000 and got an SCSI interface, he then ordered his SCSI HD which is those days was a HUGE fortune even to a dealer, it duly arrived the next day. He was like a man possessed, no one could touch the package, so he opened it up, took out his beloved HD and accidentally dropped it on to a concrete floor.

 

The noise it wade was told you it was dead and sure enough it was, Kevin almost burst in to tears, he refused to show us the invoice but it was a HUGE sum.

 

He also cracked the main PCB so its not like he could easily send it back...He simply brought another one..

 

The moral, if you are a clumsy sod then wait for technology to get cheaper

 

TMR knew the man involved, his Amiga was the child he never had, he would sit messing around with Bars & Pipes (a midi based music program used by a Mr J M Jarre), He went from Atari to Amiga while TMR's work college Rob was Atari through and through, I believe he slept with his Falcon

 

I as said had no corporate loyalty, the 8bit was my life, hobby, job and all around wonderful bit of kit but the notion of staying true to a brand just wasn't me, if I saw something great on another machine I went after it, hence my collection of old computers and consoles, I simply don't understand the Fan boy notion, if you saw a stunning game on a Snes but had a Mega Drive at the time I'd go and buy the Snes, sod Sega, its the games / software that makes the machine...

 

Why limit yourself....And that's why I saw the Amiga as a natural progression from Atari 8bit upwards..

Edited March 17, 2014 by Mclaneinc

[sack-c0s]

the ST acts more like an upgraded Amstrad CPC to be honest

[Mclaneinc]

the ST acts more like an upgraded Amstrad CPC to be honest

 

Very much so, Atari knew the 8bit was a games machine with some good utility software to do interesting things but it was used more for games.

 

So after they pooh poohed the Miner machine they thought it clever to bring a machine out with no hardware scrolling, 1 sprite (the mouse pointer) and a off the shelf tone generator. Very much like a slightly upgraded Amstrad.

 

Total madness, to think you could just bums rush the gamers and turn the machine into a self professed business computer......Utter madness...

 

We can only thank Commodore for having better business brains and allowing a machine to do both types of software. What serious stuff did the ST get most used for, well my mates company Strategic Plus Software used it to handle their orders and the only other use I hear mentioned is Cubase for the music fraternity.

 

But you got the same sort of stuff on the Amiga AND shed loads of quality games after the initial rubbish ST ports (shame on you Peter Johnson, king of rubbish ports)

[sack-c0s]

also another comparison to the CPC - seeing as it shared a CPU with the ZX Spectrum and you could get a similar screen mode out of it there were plenty of rushed ports that made no use of the extended abilities there either.

 

Although in a lot of cases the Z80 just wasn't up to it until a few screen shift tricks were discovered later on

[Mclaneinc]

The trouble is that when you are tricking he OS in to doing something that's not built in its both losing cycles and not doing something else.

 

But saying that, we love our little tricks that get found, gets a bit of new life out of the old dog..

[Fletch]

 

 

 

We can only thank Commodore for having better business brains and allowing a machine to do both types of software. What serious stuff did the ST get most used for, well my mates company Strategic Plus Software used it to handle their orders and the only other use I hear mentioned is Cubase for the music fraternity.

 

ST's were used to run mail sorting machines here in the US. ST's were used extensively by auto parts dealers for databasing. ST's had a sizable portion of the German desktop publishing business. And as you already know, the ST was very big in MIDI.

 

I may be ignorant about most things Amiga, but here in the US the only time I ever saw an Amiga that wasn't in a home was in video production. Other than the video toaster stuff what markets did the Amiga cater? I'm not being disparaging in anyway, I am simply ignorant to the Amiga's commercial use.

[Mclaneinc]

Here in Europe the Amiga was used by many for DTP and design, Bar & Pipes made it a favourite with musicians, of course the Video & audio stuff was huge but what I'm saying is that they aimed it at both games and business rather than the blinkered aim of just business. Had they bothered to do a more custom machine with game friendly hardware I think most of us would have been sitting her with ST's rather than Amiga's.

[Bryan]

 

My mate brought an Amiga A4000 and got an SCSI interface, he then ordered his SCSI HD which is those days was a HUGE fortune even to a dealer, it duly arrived the next day. He was like a man possessed, no one could touch the package, so he opened it up, took out his beloved HD and accidentally dropped it on to a concrete floor.

 

The noise it wade was told you it was dead and sure enough it was, Kevin almost burst in to tears, he refused to show us the invoice but it was a HUGE sum.

 

He also cracked the main PCB so its not like he could easily send it back...He simply brought another one..

 

The moral, if you are a clumsy sod then wait for technology to get cheaper

 

 

I'm also into vinyl collecting, and you should hear the stories of people accidentally dropping priceless records and destroying $2500 cartridges.

[Bryan]

 

ST's were used to run mail sorting machines here in the US. ST's were used extensively by auto parts dealers for databasing. ST's had a sizable portion of the German desktop publishing business. And as you already know, the ST was very big in MIDI.

I think most of those applications happened because the ST was a cheap machine with decent power. Plus, being on a lesser known platform probably meant the software was less likely to be pirated since you'd have to buy the machine as well.

[Hellraiser]

It was always obvious to me the Amiga was more an Atari machine than the Atari ST and that is was more related to the Atari 8bits. I had both, first got the ST as it came out sooner and it was/is a great machine especially as it was designed/build in such a short period of time. When I got the Amiga I didnt feel it was that much better despite the fact it took years to design/build, it had better graphics and sound but a lot of games were not that much better than the ST versions. Some games were better on the ST though, Captain Blood comes to mind...

I have both again and I use the ST more to play some games on than the Amiga which I rarely use.

Of course the one I use the most to play is my Atari 8bit, in my eyes the best 8bit ever made

[Mclaneinc]

 

I'm also into vinyl collecting, and you should hear the stories of people accidentally dropping priceless records and destroying $2500 cartridges.

 

 

Owww....

[Drummerboy]

Nice and interesting comments and histories!

All seems like could be a real fact about, Amiga the continu of the Atari 8Bit.

Talking about Atari ST, some guys wrote:

"Some designers that had done the C64 at C= under Tramiel went with him to Atari, the usage for round DIN connectors for the monitor is a typical oddity you will see on both computers."

Other guy:

"One of the designers of the C64 and the ATARI ST is Shiraz Shivji"

You know for me sound interesting, because if someone see similar parts in both computers, then in real the influence of the designers, on this occasion, he's next 16Bit project, finally know as Atari ST.

[tschak909]

It really drives me batty when I see such cut and paste drivel like "Shiraj Shivji was one of the designers of the Commodore 64"

 

NO, he wasn't.

 

He was busy designing LCD watches and calculators at that time, was transitioning to be the head of engineering of Commodore at the time. The Commodore 64 design was wholly driven by Bob Russell and Bob Yannes. Full stop.

 

Stop the revisionist bullshit

 

(ok, now that I've hijacked the thread either just ignore me, or pelt tomatoes in my direction)

 

-Thom

[bbking67]

Hey the ST was not a warmed over version of CP/M! I take offense with that comment...

 

It WAS a warmed over version of MS-DOS.

 

:-)

[+davidcalgary29]

Nothing is superior to the A8's architecture.

[The Usotsuki]

MS-DOS 2.11, yes. It gets in my craw every time I hear "TOS is CP/M-68K! TOS is CP/M-68K!" No, TOS is NOT CP/M-68K - TOS is a 68K version of DR DOS!

[kenjennings]

DOS is a defective version of CP/M. Probably don't want to advertize the DOS-ishness of TOS so loudly.

[Drummerboy]

It really drives me batty when I see such cut and paste drivel like "Shiraj Shivji was one of the designers of the Commodore 64"

 

NO, he wasn't.

 

He was busy designing LCD watches and calculators at that time, was transitioning to be the head of engineering of Commodore at the time. The Commodore 64 design was wholly driven by Bob Russell and Bob Yannes. Full stop.

 

Stop the revisionist bullshit

 

(ok, now that I've hijacked the thread either just ignore me, or pelt tomatoes in my direction)

 

-Thom

 

 

we have a historian among us..

You know men, nobody force you to answer to this topic if don't wanted.

Please don't fill with insults.

Edited March 18, 2014 by Drummerboy

[Drummerboy]

A guy from a forum friend shared these links:

 

Atari (--) Amiga contract

 

http://www.atarimuseum.com/articles/mickey.html

 

Atari 1850XLD "Project Mickey" http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/1600xl/1600xl.html

 

http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/1850xld.html

 

Thanks Danwood for the info.

 

I forgot, but i saw all this early 2000's. I Knew I saw something about this.

Thanks, mystery solved!

[+wood_jl]

This thread would be breaking news, if it were 1984 (some 30 years ago).

 

My feeling is that there IS NOT any "true" successor to the Atari 8-bit. If there were, it would probably have used an 65816 processor, and would have the "look and feel" (sorry for the use of the over-used cliche' (courtesy of Apple and its lawsuit against Microsoft) of the Atari 8-bit, booting into some descendant of Atari DOS and Atari BASIC, or some hypothetical backwards-compatible GUI. Who (other than a few Atari die-hards like me...and maybe you (not the *masses*)) would have bought such a machine? This was the dawn of the GUI era that the Macintosh started, and booting into BASIC was passe. Switching on an Amiga (or Atari ST, or IBM PC, or whatever....) "looks and feels" *nothing* like using an Atari 8-bit, which was a unique (and dear to my heart) experience from a bygone era.

 

I went with the ST, for 2 reasons: (1) I was an Atari fanboy at the time, and couldn't wait to get my clutches on the latest Atari hardware, and (2) the ST was (ESPECIALLY IN THE BEGINNING) an incredible value! Turning on the ST in the early days was both an impressive venture - with its crystal-clear RGB (or monochrome) display, and all the "power" that an 8Mhz-68000 system could provide and higher-resolution and more on-screen colors (relative to A8) - and also a disappointment because I still wanted to play A8 Donkey Kong, Star Raiders, etc....etc...etc. Well, the Amiga would have been just as disappointing, in that regard. NOT TO KNOCK the Amiga, but *both* systems had changed to something considerably different, and entirely incompatible.

 

Had it not been for tech articles explaining the "design philosophy similarity" between the A8 and the Amiga, you'd have *never* known it when using an Amiga, any more than you'd have ventured to [erroneously] conjecture that there were any such similarity between the A8 and the ST. They were both completely incompatible with the A8, the "look and feel" was much closer to the Macintosh (which definitely should be credited for pointing the way to the future), and if it weren't for some tech-head articles (to most of us, because we're not all hardware designers) explaining the "theory behind A8--->Amiga evolution," pretty much irrelevant. To most users, the internals of the machine are a black box. With the generation change (and abandonment of the 6502 architecture), there was no next-gen A8 to the user.

 

But since we're discussing such A8-->Amiga lineage, I observe that many (most??) users were pretty much brand-fanboys as well, *CIRCA 1985*. That is to say, that *most* Amiga users I knew "back in the day" (sorry for another over-used cliche') were Commodore 64 users. They pretty-much thought Atari sucked. I'm equally-guilty, as (an Atari Fanboy of the day) I thought Commodore sucked. It turns out that neither sucks. But to get back to the A8-->Amiga lineage, one was hard-pressed to get C64-->Amiga converts (fanboys) to admit that the Atari 8-bit was worth a squirt of piss. They came up from Commodore 64s, which I've since learned to appreciate as *quite* a respectable machine, and *definitely* an incredible value for the time. To *those* fanboys (historical sense here; not necessarily a modern understanding), Jay Miner's previous work sucked balls, up until the Amiga; no admiration for the incredible A8, as they were Commodore [64] fans.

 

So, this narrowed the A8-->Amiga evolution "fans" to the narrow group of those who (1) bought A8 and then (2) "jumped ship" to Commodore and bought an Amiga. While I did NOT do this, I now (no longer a fanboy) understand that this was quite a reasonable choice. But it still stands that most Amiga users (at least that I knew) were NOT A8 fans buying Amiga because of the alleged importance of this "lineage," but because they had bought Commodore previously, specifically C64 and C128. Is this "lineage" so important, after all, then? What difference does it make?

 

When I bought the ST, I was 15 years old, and I tossed newspapers and flipped burgers for a living. What mattered was that I was barely able to afford this thing, to begin with. The ST was an *incredible* value, and that was quite central to the decision. The ST served me quite well, and ST games - while admittedly not quite as flashy as later Amiga games but a generation ahead of 160x192x4 colors of the A8 - were still impressive, and at a reasonable price. Remember this ad?

 

 

The ad is *somewhat* misleading, because it was $1000 (not $800) for a *COLOR* 520ST system. But the ST was *still* almost "COLOR MAC FOR 1/3 THE PRICE." Therein lies the undeniable value of the Atari ST, in the early days. It was $1800 for a 256K Amiga at my local retailer, and I *did* check it out but couldn't afford it at the time. Had the Amiga 500 launched in place of the Amiga (later called the Amiga 1000) and with 512K and at an ST-like price, I might have bought one, and I'm quite sure I'd have been happy with it. I have one now (and a bunch of ST stuff, A8 stuff, C64 stuff....etc...etc) and I appreciate them all. But at the time (1985 and you're a kid), $1000 for a 512K 520ST vs. $1800 for a 256K Amiga meant a whole lot more to me than some "successor lineage" behind the Amiga that was as good as merely theory, as neither computer was compatible with my beloved A8, and neither computer offered the "look and feel" as my first computer, the Atari-8. I submit that the obsession with the "lineage" observation is therefore the dwelling of revisionist-historians who ignore the the facts that the Amiga "looked and felt" *NOTHING* like an A8, was just as incompatible (with an A8) as an ST, and cost significantly more money - IN THE BEGINNING.

 

"IN THE BEGINNING" means that THINGS CHANGED! By the time of the 1987 Amiga 500, Commodore was getting their act together, fast! Had the Amiga 500 launched at the same time (instead of the Amiga (or Amiga 1000 as it was later-called) as the 520ST, it would have been big trouble for Atari. The 500 doubled the RAM (and was user-expandable to 1MB) and I rather liked the form-factor that was much like that of the Atari 1040ST. Commodore also was fairly quick to offer the Amiga 2000 design, which was nothing less than admirable, for the time. As an ST user, I was somewhat jealous of the "big-box PC-like form factor" of the Amiga 2000; that was a great machine. But note that it has nothing to do with A8-->Amiga lineage. It has to do with price and freedom of form-factor choice; Atari took an eternity to answer to this, and never really did.

 

Now, some ST-fanboys may object to this next point:

As time progressed, the price/performance ratio of the Atari ST decreased, and the price/performance ratio of the Amiga increased. In the beginning, it was the $1000 520ST with double the RAM (and 1/2 the disk drive) against the $1800 Amiga with half the RAM (and double the disk drive) AND THIS CHANGED to EQUALLY-PRICED (or near) Amiga 500 with equal-the-RAM (and *****user-expandable to 1MB**** (unlike 520ST)) and double the disk drive (although I understand later Atari 520STfm's had double-sided drives). Atari had the Mega ST series, but (1) it wasn't as large and expandable as the Amiga 2000, and (2) it was NOT CHEAP like the original 520ST/1040ST.

 

The Atari STe series came pretty much too late to me, and by 1990 I'd already moved to the PC. In either case (Atari or Commodore), by the time the Atari Falcon or Amiga 1200/4000 came out, I'd long-since made the move to el-cheapo PCs that were 66-100Mhz.......neither was price/performance-effective.

 

But the facts remain that (1) Out of the gate, the 520ST and 1040ST were bang-for-the-price champions, FINE PERFORMERS. (2) When the Amiga 500 came out, it was what the Amiga should have been to "win the war" to begin with. If Commodore could have pulled off the A500 in 1985, they likely would have won, handily. (3) These factors matter so much more than any theory of "lineage" as **actual use** of either machine implied no "lineage," and such "lineage" was transparent to the user (and not acknowledged by C64-->Amiga users who are the most die-hard Amiga fans anyway). My ST was a fine machine, and carried me to the PC era well, competently, satisfyingly, and affordably. Had I chosen an Amiga instead, I'd likely have said the same thing. I really like my Amiga 500 now, and I think it's the most representative of the Amiga line, and quite a success. But any "A8-->Amiga" lineage has little-to-nothing to do with it, although it's an interesting historical footnote. But let's not over-hype this "lineage" because it's of very little consequence. If we want to tout A8 lineage, I want a 16-bit 65C816 machine that runs A8 software much as my 80386 ran 8086 software, but no such counterpoint to the A8 ever existed.

[atarian63]

The preemptive multitasking OS was considerably better than, say a warmed over port of CP/M.

Had it worked, but when released it was crash happy like crazy and looked like a little kid made the icons and a fuzzy display. St os was much cleaner and nicer

[atarian63]

This thread would be breaking news, if it were 1984 (some 30 years ago).

 

My feeling is that there IS NOT any "true" successor to the Atari 8-bit. If there were, it would probably have used an 65816 processor, and would have the "look and feel" (sorry for the use of the over-used cliche' (courtesy of Apple and its lawsuit against Microsoft) of the Atari 8-bit, booting into some descendant of Atari DOS and Atari BASIC, or some hypothetical backwards-compatible GUI. Who (other than a few Atari die-hards like me...and maybe you (not the *masses*)) would have bought such a machine? This was the dawn of the GUI era that the Macintosh started, and booting into BASIC was passe. Switching on an Amiga (or Atari ST, or IBM PC, or whatever....) "looks and feels" *nothing* like using an Atari 8-bit, which was a unique (and dear to my heart) experience from a bygone era.

 

I went with the ST, for 2 reasons: (1) I was an Atari fanboy at the time, and couldn't wait to get my clutches on the latest Atari hardware, and (2) the ST was (ESPECIALLY IN THE BEGINNING) an incredible value! Turning on the ST in the early days was both an impressive venture - with its crystal-clear RGB (or monochrome) display, and all the "power" that an 8Mhz-68000 system could provide and higher-resolution and more on-screen colors (relative to A8) - and also a disappointment because I still wanted to play A8 Donkey Kong, Star Raiders, etc....etc...etc. Well, the Amiga would have been just as disappointing, in that regard. NOT TO KNOCK the Amiga, but *both* systems had changed to something considerably different, and entirely incompatible.

 

Had it not been for tech articles explaining the "design philosophy similarity" between the A8 and the Amiga, you'd have *never* known it when using an Amiga, any more than you'd have ventured to [erroneously] conjecture that there were any such similarity between the A8 and the ST. They were both completely incompatible with the A8, the "look and feel" was much closer to the Macintosh (which definitely should be credited for pointing the way to the future), and if it weren't for some tech-head articles (to most of us, because we're not all hardware designers) explaining the "theory behind A8--->Amiga evolution," pretty much irrelevant. To most users, the internals of the machine are a black box. With the generation change (and abandonment of the 6502 architecture), there was no next-gen A8 to the user.

 

But since we're discussing such A8-->Amiga lineage, I observe that many (most??) users were pretty much brand-fanboys as well, *CIRCA 1985*. That is to say, that *most* Amiga users I knew "back in the day" (sorry for another over-used cliche') were Commodore 64 users. They pretty-much thought Atari sucked. I'm equally-guilty, as (an Atari Fanboy of the day) I thought Commodore sucked. It turns out that neither sucks. But to get back to the A8-->Amiga lineage, one was hard-pressed to get C64-->Amiga converts (fanboys) to admit that the Atari 8-bit was worth a squirt of piss. They came up from Commodore 64s, which I've since learned to appreciate as *quite* a respectable machine, and *definitely* an incredible value for the time. To *those* fanboys (historical sense here; not necessarily a modern understanding), Jay Miner's previous work sucked balls, up until the Amiga; no admiration for the incredible A8, as they were Commodore [64] fans.

 

So, this narrowed the A8-->Amiga evolution "fans" to the narrow group of those who (1) bought A8 and then (2) "jumped ship" to Commodore and bought an Amiga. While I did NOT do this, I now (no longer a fanboy) understand that this was quite a reasonable choice. But it still stands that most Amiga users (at least that I knew) were NOT A8 fans buying Amiga because of the alleged importance of this "lineage," but because they had bought Commodore previously, specifically C64 and C128. Is this "lineage" so important, after all, then? What difference does it make?

 

When I bought the ST, I was 15 years old, and I tossed newspapers and flipped burgers for a living. What mattered was that I was barely able to afford this thing, to begin with. The ST was an *incredible* value, and that was quite central to the decision. The ST served me quite well, and ST games - while admittedly not quite as flashy as later Amiga games but a generation ahead of 160x192x4 colors of the A8 - were still impressive, and at a reasonable price. Remember this ad?

 

atari_520st_ripoff_large.jpg

 

The ad is *somewhat* misleading, because it was $1000 (not $800) for a *COLOR* 520ST system. But the ST was *still* almost "COLOR MAC FOR 1/3 THE PRICE." Therein lies the undeniable value of the Atari ST, in the early days. It was $1800 for a 256K Amiga at my local retailer, and I *did* check it out but couldn't afford it at the time. Had the Amiga 500 launched in place of the Amiga (later called the Amiga 1000) and with 512K and at an ST-like price, I might have bought one, and I'm quite sure I'd have been happy with it. I have one now (and a bunch of ST stuff, A8 stuff, C64 stuff....etc...etc) and I appreciate them all. But at the time (1985 and you're a kid), $1000 for a 512K 520ST vs. $1800 for a 256K Amiga meant a whole lot more to me than some "successor lineage" behind the Amiga that was as good as merely theory, as neither computer was compatible with my beloved A8, and neither computer offered the "look and feel" as my first computer, the Atari-8. I submit that the obsession with the "lineage" observation is therefore the dwelling of revisionist-historians who ignore the the facts that the Amiga "looked and felt" *NOTHING* like an A8, was just as incompatible (with an A8) as an ST, and cost significantly more money - IN THE BEGINNING.

 

"IN THE BEGINNING" means that THINGS CHANGED! By the time of the 1987 Amiga 500, Commodore was getting their act together, fast! Had the Amiga 500 launched at the same time (instead of the Amiga (or Amiga 1000 as it was later-called) as the 520ST, it would have been big trouble for Atari. The 500 doubled the RAM (and was user-expandable to 1MB) and I rather liked the form-factor that was much like that of the Atari 1040ST. Commodore also was fairly quick to offer the Amiga 2000 design, which was nothing less than admirable, for the time. As an ST user, I was somewhat jealous of the "big-box PC-like form factor" of the Amiga 2000; that was a great machine. But note that it has nothing to do with A8-->Amiga lineage. It has to do with price and freedom of form-factor choice; Atari took an eternity to answer to this, and never really did.

 

Now, some ST-fanboys may object to this next point:

As time progressed, the price/performance ratio of the Atari ST decreased, and the price/performance ratio of the Amiga increased. In the beginning, it was the $1000 520ST with double the RAM (and 1/2 the disk drive) against the $1800 Amiga with half the RAM (and double the disk drive) AND THIS CHANGED to EQUALLY-PRICED (or near) Amiga 500 with equal-the-RAM (and *****user-expandable to 1MB**** (unlike 520ST)) and double the disk drive (although I understand later Atari 520STfm's had double-sided drives). Atari had the Mega ST series, but (1) it wasn't as large and expandable as the Amiga 2000, and (2) it was NOT CHEAP like the original 520ST/1040ST.

 

The Atari STe series came pretty much too late to me, and by 1990 I'd already moved to the PC. In either case (Atari or Commodore), by the time the Atari Falcon or Amiga 1200/4000 came out, I'd long-since made the move to el-cheapo PCs that were 66-100Mhz.......neither was price/performance-effective.

 

But the facts remain that (1) Out of the gate, the 520ST and 1040ST were bang-for-the-price champions, FINE PERFORMERS. (2) When the Amiga 500 came out, it was what the Amiga should have been to "win the war" to begin with. If Commodore could have pulled off the A500 in 1985, they likely would have won, handily. (3) These factors matter so much more than any theory of "lineage" as **actual use** of either machine implied no "lineage," and such "lineage" was transparent to the user (and not acknowledged by C64-->Amiga users who are the most die-hard Amiga fans anyway). My ST was a fine machine, and carried me to the PC era well, competently, satisfyingly, and affordably. Had I chosen an Amiga instead, I'd likely have said the same thing. I really like my Amiga 500 now, and I think it's the most representative of the Amiga line, and quite a success. But any "A8-->Amiga" lineage has little-to-nothing to do with it, although it's an interesting historical footnote. But let's not over-hype this "lineage" because it's of very little consequence. If we want to tout A8 lineage, I want a 16-bit 65C816 machine that runs A8 software much as my 80386 ran 8086 software, but no such counterpoint to the A8 ever existed.

You left out the fact that due to ram shortages etc, it was LATE 87 really 88 that ST was hard to get for us dealers in the states, supply was going to europe, THEN the a500 came readily available and was sadly often all we had to sell, (or some waste of time PC clone) . it was timing mainly, we still were selling as many ST's as we could get, however we could not get many. As mention most users had no real idea what was inside and bought what was available. we sold them but I was plenty pissed at Atari for making things the way that they were. St still had a large software advantage,could have been different had there been supply, but here in the states there was nearly nothing for a year or so. too late by then.

[atarian63]

the ST acts more like an upgraded Amstrad CPC to be honest

wrong o sack o

[atarian63]

MS-DOS 2.11, yes. It gets in my craw every time I hear "TOS is CP/M-68K! TOS is CP/M-68K!" No, TOS is NOT CP/M-68K - TOS is a 68K version of DR DOS!

cp/m 68k

[atarian63]

The preemptive multitasking OS was considerably better than, say a warmed over port of CP/M.

except it did not really work well for quite some time and there was no practical use for the AVERAGE user