What caused you to change (Atari/non-Atari) platforms?

[vidak]

Awesome!!

[zzip]

I wish the 68000 had become the ancestor of our CPU hardware because it was a very beautiful design.

I've often wished this. One of my college classes was in system architecture anad involved programming in assembly language on the x86. At the same time I had an ST and was self-learning 68000 assembly. Programming assembly on the 68000 was a dream compared to the headaches x86 assembly caused me. 68K always seemed like a cleaner design. The x86 was older and carried more baggage. To be fair we were doing ASM on 286's. The 386s improved the memory model and made things a little easier.

 

Supposedly the 68000 was a contender for the IBM PC, but Motorola couldn't supply chips at the volume IBM wanted.

[Keatah]

I heard that story, from numerous angles. It's very likely correct.

[calimero]

There is story that IBM consider to use Atari 8bit line as their PC computer

[MrMaddog]

I've often wished this. One of my college classes was in system architecture anad involved programming in assembly language on the x86. At the same time I had an ST and was self-learning 68000 assembly. Programming assembly on the 68000 was a dream compared to the headaches x86 assembly caused me. 68K always seemed like a cleaner design. The x86 was older and carried more baggage. To be fair we were doing ASM on 286's. The 386s improved the memory model and made things a little easier.

 

Supposedly the 68000 was a contender for the IBM PC, but Motorola couldn't supply chips at the volume IBM wanted.

 

You're telling me! In college I had to learn 8086 Assembly on Pentium II PC's w/o using any 32-bit registers or commands. Figure that out...

 

After that course I bought an Atari ST assembly language tutorial and downloaded an assembler, and the registers were so much nicer to use.

 

Fact was 68000 based computers were so much better than early PC's due to not having to be handicapped by memory segementation (ie figure how to "load high" and have enough room in "640K's enough for everyone"). Once the 386's came out, they offer flat 32-bit memory access while providing backwards compatibilty with old 16-bit DOS crap. And then it was over for the poor 68K family.

[Keatah]

 

You're telling me! In college I had to learn 8086 Assembly on Pentium II PC's w/o using any 32-bit registers or commands. Figure that out...

 

After that course I bought an Atari ST assembly language tutorial and downloaded an assembler, and the registers were so much nicer to use.

 

Fact was 68000 based computers were so much better than early PC's due to not having to be handicapped by memory segementation (ie figure how to "load high" and have enough room in "640K's enough for everyone"). Once the 386's came out, they offer flat 32-bit memory access while providing backwards compatibilty with old 16-bit DOS crap. And then it was over for the poor 68K family.

 

I can't! I had to do the same shit too. None of it made any sense, the reason behind the lesson or the lesson itself.

 

And this was about the time (give or take a year or three) the intel line-up started pulling ahead with massive clock speed gains. Back in the day MHz was everything. 33 was better than 25, no questions asked. And it was a simple number the general populace (including beancounter purchasers) could understand.

[LoTonah]

I switched because of two reasons.

 

First, I was running a 520STfm with 4Mb of memory and a 4096 color upgrade. After a while it started screwing up disks...and I could find NO ONE to repair it. I would have had to send it to California to have the board looked at...I lived in British Columbia. Yeah, I could have sent it to Ontario and had it fixed there, maybe even Edmonton, but I was pretty isolated and didn't know the right people. I knew a few people in Vancouver, but not one of the Atari stores there would look at it.

 

Second, people were already starting to give me spare parts. I had amassed a 286 with 1Mb of RAM and a 40Gb hard drive, VGA card, mono VGA monitor, keyboard and mouse... and didn't pay a dime for it. I had to buy my own copy of MS-DOS, but that wasn't all that bad.

 

I eventually bought another Atari (a 1040STE) and ran that as my main computer for about another year, and i bought Bill Wilkinson's hard drive from him. He didn't wipe it before sending it to me so I had all his utilities and source code, until it screwed up and I had to reformat!! Should have made a backup (sigh). But Windows 3.1 came out and that was that. I think at that point the 286 had been swapped with a free 386SX-16 board.