What was the next computer or console you bought after the ST?

[Jfcatari]

1040 ST

Mega 4 ST with ICD Turbo Speed 16

486DX 66 -> Running Linux

Various Intel self built PC all -> Running Linux

Today Asus 12th gen Intel i7 -> Running Linux

 

[Lostdragon]

Megadrive. 

 

I think i picked up Streets Of Rage, Revenge Of Shinobi with it. 

 

 

Fell in love with the console there and then. 

[Ely]

Oct 1994. A 486-66 PC with 8Mb Memory, 15" SVGA Monitor, 420Gb HDD in a full tower case. It cost me £1600 (or $2000) and didn't even include a sound card or a CD ROM drive. Mental.

[Zafinn Books]

I use to sell Atari/Commodore system up until 1992 (official Atari/CBM distributor in Ireland), still used my Mega 1 up until 1994 when a 486 entered the home 😬 (still have my original Mega 1). In 1993 I switched sides and spent almost 7 years at Gateway2000/Gateway pushing PCs in marketing. You can read more about that and an interesting Atari/CBM story at my site here > Atari Explorer

[+x=usr(1536)]

20 minutes ago, Zafinn Books said:

I use to sell Atari/Commodore system up until 1992 (official Atari/CBM distributor in Ireland)

Just curious: were you by any chance connected to Peat's?  I used to get nearly all of my (new) Atari hardware there.

[Zafinn Books]

18 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Just curious: were you by any chance connected to Peat's?  I used to get nearly all of my (new) Atari hardware there.

Hi @x=usr(1536) - No, but I used to go there as a kid to get my Atari stuff too 😁 We supplied Peats among others and had stores across the city including Switzers, Clearys, Eason and Grafton Arcade - and a business center on Chatham Lane.

Edited March 8 by Zafinn Books
Grammar :-(

[+x=usr(1536)]

9 minutes ago, Zafinn Books said:

Hi @x=usr(1536) - No, but I used to go there as a kid to get my Atari stuff too 😁 We supplied Peats among others and had stores across the city including Switzers, Clearys, Eason and Grafton Arcade - and a business center on Chatham Lane.

Very nice!  Did you ever go to the AUGI meetings at Power's Hotel?  If so, we've probably been in the same room at the same time 

 

(My last off-topic question in the thread - I promise)

[Christos]

A second hand pentium 3. 

[doctor_shred]

After the STE I got a Lynx 2, then a Jaguar.

 

I finally ended up with a Windows 95 PC in about 1999 for productivity but still used my Jag for games.

[Wayneb123]

 I bought a clone 386 25Mhz PC in 1992, I bought my first ST when they first hit the store shelves, I was waiting on it. I got rid of my old Atari stuff in the late 90's, wish I had kept the PS3000. I now have a 1040 STF, Mega ST, MegaSTE and a TT030, I also built one of remake boards.

[oracle_jedi]

I went to a 286 PC with a colour VGA monitor and a small hard disk.   It was 1991 so probably Windows 3.0 or 3.1. 

 

But I had to sell the ST to afford the new system, and it took a while to scrape together the funds, so I actually moved back to my 800XL, 1050 drive, 1027 printer for occasional correspondence, and got distracted for a brief time by a cheap and nasty used Advance 86B which was an awful 8086 PC clone. 

 

[Bodhi]

I never bought an ST.

[Shredder11]

On 3/6/2024 at 8:41 AM, Zogging Hell said:

Ah a classic motherboard from a fine maker (joke!). I have one here myself, well two in fact, although one has lived up to the PC Chips reputation for quality and died. The inbuilt graphics were awful as well, but at least it could run Doom well!

Yep although mine was still working when I got rid of it. Once I had some money to buy my own PC at the beginning of 2002, I chose an ASUS TUSL2-C motherboard with Celeron 1200 (now has PIII 1400S as of 2024) and GeForce 2 MX400 AGP (FX5900XT since 2004), and has been extensively upgraded over the years and is still in use; fantastic machine. Lessons learned from those early donated PCs? Always stick with Intel chipsets! Had endless problems prior to this, due to those PCs having VIA or SiS chipsets.

[Goochman]

The end of my ST story ended when I couldnt get a good VT100 or such emulation through my modem.  I needed this to work remotely when out of hour support was needed.  The best program at the time was ProComm Plus on the PC so I had to jump ship and got a low end 486 or such at the time with a Trident SVGA card!

[bfollowell]

My next computer after I got my STs was just another self-built PC clone. Let me elaborate.

 

I was not an original ST owner. I bought my Atari 800 in 1982 and it got mostly half-way through college. The keyboard was eventually broken through too much abuse from dorm-mates playing Karateka and, not knowing any better at the time, I discarded it and replaced it with an 800XL. I was a poor college student when the ST line came out and I drooled over them all the way through college. I wanted an ST so badly, then the Megas came out and I wanted one of those. Later, towards the end of my college career the STes made their debut. Finally the Mega STe came out. I drooled over the ST line all through this time and could never afford one. My beloved 8-bit got me through everything I needed a computer for, even though all I wanted to do was to replace her. I finally graduated college and started my career and my family in the very early nineties. It came time for me to finally purchase a new computer and Atari had just announced the Falcon. I planned to ordered one, but it just never happened. Everything I used at work was PC based and I knew that I'd never be able to use the Falcon to help with anything work related, so I changed my mind and bought a generic 486SX33 from Treasure Chest Computers in 1993.

 

I've alway regretted  not buying that Falcon when I had the chance. All it would have done would have prolonged my entry into the PC world by one generation, but I'd still have my falcon today, I'm certain. Just another of life's regrets.

 

Anyway, as luck would have it, I had a 520STM and a couple of 1040STFs fall into my lap in the mid nineties, but I was already into the PC world by that time. I've since sold those machines off and adopted and converted a U.K. 1040STE which I love playing with. I'd still love to have a Mega STE and a Falcon, but it just isn't practical with today's pricing, so I don't see that ever happening.

 

Today, I'm an avid PC gamer and just completed my roughly eleventh gaming rig. I still have several Atari 8-bits, my first love, as well as my 1040STE upgraded to 4MB with an original 4160STE case badge to match.

 

[Zogging Hell]

21 hours ago, Shredder11 said:

Yep although mine was still working when I got rid of it. Once I had some money to buy my own PC at the beginning of 2002, I chose an ASUS TUSL2-C motherboard with Celeron 1200 (now has PIII 1400S as of 2024) and GeForce 2 MX400 AGP (FX5900XT since 2004), and has been extensively upgraded over the years and is still in use; fantastic machine. Lessons learned from those early donated PCs? Always stick with Intel chipsets! Had endless problems prior to this, due to those PCs having VIA or SiS chipsets.

Now that is a good motherboard, and now worth a fair sum if ebay is anything to go by. I must admit I've not encountered the stability problems you mention with the alternative chipsets on socket 370, but they were all clean installs with final drivers so maybe that is why (being aquired much later). They do seem to run slower though.

[zzip]

2 hours ago, bfollowell said:

It came time for me to finally purchase a new computer and Atari had just announced the Falcon. I planned to ordered one, but it just never happened. Everything I used at work was PC based and I knew that I'd never be able to use the Falcon to help with anything work related, so I changed my mind and bought a generic 486SX33 from Treasure Chest Computers in 1993.

 

I've alway regretted  not buying that Falcon when I had the chance. All it would have done would have prolonged my entry into the PC world by one generation, but I'd still have my falcon today, I'm certain. Just another of life's regrets.

I too felt torn between a PC and Falcon.   But a friend got a Falcon and that gave me a chance to use it, and I found UI was a little more awkward than the ST due to all the extra graphics modes and it crashed all the time (or at least his did).   It did feel a little regret buying a 486 instead at first, but soon found the 486 blew the Falcon away in just about every respect.   I also got the PC just before the Internet exploded and was able to use the latest browser software like Netscape.  I saw how my friend struggled with internet on his Falcon.

 

In retrospect I don't regret not having a Falcon because I don't see a whole lot of Falcon-specific software that would have made it worth it.

 

 

[+remowilliams]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

In retrospect I don't regret not having a Falcon because I don't see a whole lot of Falcon-specific software that would have made it worth it.

I would have been absolutely furious had I somehow scraped together the money for a Falcon the first time I saw it, to only then find out that Atari had shoved it out the door just as they were dropping stone dead...  😄

[Shredder11]

6 hours ago, Zogging Hell said:

Now that is a good motherboard, and now worth a fair sum if ebay is anything to go by. I must admit I've not encountered the stability problems you mention with the alternative chipsets on socket 370, but they were all clean installs with final drivers so maybe that is why (being aquired much later). They do seem to run slower though.

The problems I had were entirely hardware related, and all the proposed software or driver solutions never worked. The VIA and SiS were not terrible in themselves, but they were VERY picky about what other hardware they would work with especially soundcards. Once I went with Intel every single bit of hardware since including soundcards have just simply worked, without the need to find solutions or workarounds.  In a nutshell the VIA + AMD combo were generally ok for gamers at the time, but useless for pro musicians and people doing multimedia stuff.  In hindsight back in 2000 I should have kept using my Atari STE 4MB machine sync'd to my nice Fostex DMT8 v2 multitrack recorder and Steinberg Cubase sequencer, for another few years until around say 2005/7 when computing power had moved on enough to replace the bombproof Atari ST + digital recorder setups that people had been using throughout the 1990s.

[atarian1]

6 hours ago, Shredder11 said:

The problems I had were entirely hardware related, and all the proposed software or driver solutions never worked. The VIA and SiS were not terrible in themselves, but they were VERY picky about what other hardware they would work with especially soundcards. Once I went with Intel every single bit of hardware since including soundcards have just simply worked, without the need to find solutions or workarounds.  In a nutshell the VIA + AMD combo were generally ok for gamers at the time, but useless for pro musicians and people doing multimedia stuff.  In hindsight back in 2000 I should have kept using my Atari STE 4MB machine sync'd to my nice Fostex DMT8 v2 multitrack recorder and Steinberg Cubase sequencer, for another few years until around say 2005/7 when computing power had moved on enough to replace the bombproof Atari ST + digital recorder setups that people had been using throughout the 1990s.

I eventually got a Pentium 3 1GHz PC around 1999 when GEnie finally folded. I mainly used the ST (upgraded to a Falcon in 1996) everyday for telecommunications at that time because that was where it really excelled and it was fun. I lost interest in gaming so telecommunications was my new "game machine". Since there was still the usenet, GEnie, and a few local BBS that supported Atari around here in the 90s, there was plenty for me to do during my little free time on my Falcon while spending most of my waking hours studying in college. However, usenet posts started going down, BBSes were going down, and the last straw was when GEnie folded. Everything was on the internet by then, so I went the PC route.

 

That is where I encountered the chipset problems with soundcards. My PC had a VIA chipset and I wanted to use a pro-sumer sound card (can't remember the name, but it was a Turtle Beach card) to continue my sound editing fun that I started on the Falcon, but now with sharper graphics and MUCH faster editing. The system locked up whenever the card was installed, but worked fine with cheap ass SoundBlasters. My dealer who I bought it from (who was also an Atari dealer) tried his best to figure out what was wrong, but he was unsuccessful. He mentioned that if he knew I was going to use the PC with a "fancy" sound card, he would have recommended a motherboard with an Intel chipset instead. He wouldn't allow me to exchange it or anything so I was peeved at everything PC. Luckily, CompUSA allowed me to return the card and got a full refund. I would have been really pissed if they didn't as I think it was like $600. At that point, I knew my next computer would be a Mac as I didn't want to deal with this chipset incompatibility crap again. Thank Apple for the Mac Mini.

 

[+Larry]

After my 1040 ST, I  built a 386 system with EGA graphics,  a "big" HDD, Windows 3.0 or 3.1, etc.  I was never much of a gamer, but the PC business/productivity software was definitely of great interest to me.  Somewhere along the way, I got Turbo Basic (for the  PC), and started writing business software for work.  (BTW, I kept the 1040 ST for quite a few years after moving to PC's.)

[Ppyo]

After I parted ways with my ST, I got a 486. Once it was time to upgrade that, I built all my PC's, running Linux in them (and keeping Windoze for gaming only).

Nowadays the prodigal son returns (1040STF, and an 800XL), although I am still a Linux user  (and Windoze still only for games...  )

[+DarkLord]

21 minutes ago, Ppyo said:

I am still a Linux user

 

Good man!