Atari ST's in history.

[deadmeow]

I just recently decided to get into Atari ST emulation. What a nice system the Atari ST was. It seems nearly as good as the Amiga, and better than the Apple IIgs (I had a IIgs). I just can't understand why Atari didn't spend some money to advertise these things?

 

I never knew anyone who owned an Atari ST or never saw them mentioned in computer magazines. The Apple IIgs got a little bit of attention, but soon after its release, most support was given to the Macs by Apple. The Amiga received a decent amount of attention, but crappy PC's with their crappy single task MSDOS OS were somehow entrenching their feet as the standard.

 

If you look at it, Macs, Apple IIgs, Atari ST's, Amigas, all had OS's with desktop GUI's and most could multitask to one degree or another, yet IBM PC clones became the standard. I think that is such a shame.

[carmel_andrews]

depends what country your living in, the st was only so-so in the states, they did get some original software releases but most of it was stuff imported from europe and the UK

 

magazine wise, mainly compute!, antic and analog

 

ST was very popular in europe, about equal with the amiga, most of the software development (games and apps) were either done in europe or the UK...that's still the case today

 

In the UK, ST was the most popular post 8bit machine untill cbm dropped the amiga's price point to the same level as the ST, untill late 1990, the ST was the most popular machine to releasing games on (almost as popular as the games consoles of the time)

 

Magazine wise, most computer related (non pc) publication's always had ST coverage (outside the Atari specific mags)

[Rybags]

I can remember the ST getting widespread coverage - probably even more in proportion to the 400/800 in the good ol' days when the only alternatives were the Apple II and TRS-80.

 

Problem was, the ST enjoyed massive success but only on a brief timescale. By around 1989 the Amiga was price competitive.

By about 1991, the PC became a viable home machine for many people.

By 1992, Atari and Commodore were on their last legs.

 

Even better variants were planned, but even a 68040 would have struggled against the '486, and the 68060 would have been no match for the Pentium once it ramped up above 133 MHz.

[+DarkLord]

Even better variants were planned, but even a 68040 would have struggled against the '486, and the 68060 would have been no match for the Pentium once it ramped up above 133 MHz.

 

Hmm, I think it would be quite interesting to stack my 95mhz CT60 powered Falcon

up against a "PC" running at 133mhz...

[+remowilliams]

What a nice system the Atari ST was. It seems nearly as good as the Amiga, and better than the Apple IIgs (I had a IIgs). I just can't understand why Atari didn't spend some money to advertise these things?

The ST was a great system in its day. Affordable and powerful. Atari f*cked up with the ST, just like they managed to with nearly everything else. They couldn't market their way out of a paper bag, and they were cheap assholes on top of everything else.

 

While I have a soft spot for the IIGS (I've got a nicely loaded little one ) it was no match for the 68K based computers.

 

Even better variants were planned, but even a 68040 would have struggled against the '486, and the 68060 would have been no match for the Pentium once it ramped up above 133 MHz.

My own personal timeframe goes along with that. I sadly had to abandon the ST line as an everyday platform when the '486s finally came to bear.

Edited January 2, 2007 by remowilliams

[Christos]

I kept the falcon as my standard machine untill 2000 came and because I had to use Windows software for my thesis...

[Curt Vendel]

The hardware was great, the true issues lay in not truly revolutionizing TOS, instead they simple made little fixes and corrections, each iteration of system should've had a better version of TOS visually and capability wise.

 

Also, another issue at hand (no phun truly intended) was that PoS mouse!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

The ST-1 looked like a carry over from the Xerox Alto for crying out loud! It would've have taken much to have made a more ergonomic set of plastics and increased the resolution and speed of the mice.

 

Better and faster hardware are certain nice and were essentially, but TOS was a very lean and light weight OS and constantly improving the User Experience and interaction were area's sorely overlooked by the Tramiels and it really cost them the edge in the market.

 

Just look at Apple - the Finder and the user input H/W constantly improved in major steps with each new generation of Hardware. I got my feet wet on an 128MB Mac with a pair of 400K disk drives in the lab at college as a proctor, I then got to perform a "Fat Mac" Upgrade to it and later we added an Apple SC20 hard disk to it, moving to a HD made all the world of change.

 

Comparing a Mac 128MB to an Atari 520ST with an SF354 - hands down the Atari ST won in speed and a nicer looking OS...

 

That advantage was quickly lost to Atari as it only made little minor upgrades while Apple and Amiga made big strides...

 

Over in the PC camp - once Windows 3.0 made its debut - the whole playfield changed, then with Windows for Workgroups and built in networking - that serious hurt Atari is there was really no serious networking for the ST's other then a small handful of limited featured and expensive 3rd party hw/sw solutions.

 

Once the PC's finally had official windowing software, mice wysiwyg applications - that was it for Atari and Amiga - Apple survived because it was the Hip - In thing to own and had created a cult following as loyal as say the Atari 2600 fanbase is even today.

 

 

 

Curt

[Gunstar]

You are right, Curt, about the little improvements over the larger strides of the Amiga and Mac and PC. I didn't even own an ST until about 2001. I went straight from my Atari 130XE to a PC, with my new gaming done on a Jaguar. I always intended to upgrade to an ST or even a Falcon, but by the time I was ready, it was clear in the Atari community that the Jaguar was Atari's future, and that investing in an Atari computer at that time would be a big mistake for lack of support. So I got through college writing term papers on my XE with Atari Writer XE, and playing the Jaguar&Lynx. I got my first PC afterwards. But being an Atarian and knowing I missed the whole 16/32-bit Atari era, so I pick up a 1040STF and then a MSTE later. Back to the point, your point though, was that when I got the 1040, it was o.k., exactly what I expected from a 16-bit computer circa 1985. it looked and for the most part felt like a color Mac. Quite equal IMHO. But then I got the Mega STE circa 1989(90?) and was VERY suprised at how little had changed with TOS&GEM. I had expected something at least on the visual level with Window 3.0. But it was still the same drab 1985 desktop and icons. I upgraded ASAP to Neodesk 3 on both my ST's, at least I get colorful icons and wallpaper, and it looks more like a newer Amiga or Mac again. Of course the TT and Falcons were bigger improvements, but the Amiga and Mac had already been there by then... it did seem like where Atari Corp. started out with a slight advantage in '85, with the COLOR Jackintosh for half the price, and the Amiga not yet released. But Soon after it became a game of "catch up" vs. Commodore and Apple. Atari still had the advantage in price vs. performance to the Amiga and Mac for a couple years, but that gap also closed quickly, especially with Commodore.

[+DarkLord]

But then I got the Mega STE circa 1989(90?) and was VERY suprised at how little had changed with TOS&GEM.

 

I'm sorry to disagree, but there is a *world* of difference, especially in functionality

between TOS from 1985 and TOS versions 2.x and up...!

[Rybags]

If forgot to mention the lack of OS evolution.

 

I've only used later versions in the emulator, and although better they don't exactly rock the Earth.

 

Multitasking was another sadly lacking feature, even though it took Apple and Windows machines years to finally get it right (ie - proper pre-emptive).

 

My earlier CPU comparison was probably a bit out - I can remember the 68K having a good advantage over the x86. Where modern Athlon XPs have 25% or so more throughput than the early Pentium 4s, with the 68K vs '286, it was more like 200% - so a 90 MHz 68060 would probably be a close match to a P200 MMX.

[Gregory DG]

I got bored quick with the basic TOS/GEM with my STe, so I got NeoDesk. Wow, if only Atari had incorporated some of those features into their software!

[deadmeow]

There was something magic about the 16 bit era of computing. Computers were serious machines, with more gaming potential of course, but you could do so much more, and the desktop GUI based OS's were incredible.

 

I loved my Apple IIgs, but I knew Apples focus was on Macs, and just keeping the Apple II 8/16 bit machines afloat just to make money. The Atari's were really nice machines, and the Amigas were mind blowing.

 

I sometimes wonder what if the Macs had never came along, and the Apple II had been the focus. Before the Macs there was the Apple III, and LISA failures. At least I got my hands on a 16 bit Apple II, that era of computers was almost as much fun as the 8 bit era.

[DigitalQuirk]

I started out with an Atari 2600, but because Commodores were used in our school, I went with a Commodore 64. When the affordable 16 bits hit the scene, it was the Amiga 500 vs. the Atari 520/1040ST. While I considered both of these technically superior to the '286 PC clones of the day, I deemed the Amiga 500 more technically advanced than the 16 bit Ataris.

 

I couldn't understand how it was that these technically inferior PC's were beating the crap out of Atari, Commodore, and Apple in the computer market, until I was around 22. At the time, I was studying Information Systems in college. I had an Amiga 500 with 1MB of RAM, an external 880k disk drive, a 1084s monitor, a brand new USRobotics Sportster 14.4k modem, a used 20 MB hard drive, an Epson LX-810 printer, and I had upgraded my processor to a 68010. I also upgraded my Kickstart to 1.3 and workbench to 1.3 to support the hard drive.

 

I was hitting a wall with my Amiga. I had long since tired of the games, preferring to connect to local BBS's with my modem in my spare time and downloading mail packets from Fidonet. I used a DOS emulator for running older DOS applications in my course, which was barely adequate and wouldn't support the high density disks we were using. I wanted to use the modem for faxing. I wanted to use a word processor with a spell checker. These things required further hardware upgrades to my Amiga that I simply couldn't afford. Heck, a used hard drive or hard drive controller would set me back $100 for either, and now my hard drive was flaking out badly. Doing so much work with PC's in school, I decided to budget $100 to put together a PC to take care of my school stuff and use the Amiga for other things.

 

For $100, I managed to build a '286 PC out of used components that contained a 40MB hard drive, 640k of RAM, a 16 Mhz processor, a single 1.44MB 3.5" disk drive, an EGA graphics card, and an orange monochrome EGA monitor. It ran remarkably glitch-free. After installing DOS 6, I proceeded to install the free fax modem software that came with my modem. I was stunned. The free fax software, running under 640k of RAM with memory to spare, blew away the Amiga software that cost quite a bit of money to buy and required a couple of megabytes just to run. The free telecommunications software was better than the best on my Amiga. Where the Sportster barely broke 12 kb/s on the Amiga, it was connecting at just over 19 kb/s on the PC. The offline mail readers were better.

 

It didn't stop there. I hooked up my printer to my PC next, as it could easily and quickly run WordPefect 5.1 with a spellchecker, among other very sophisticated features. I obtained a Lotus 1-2-3 knock-off; a very powerful spreadsheet. I had dabbled with spreadsheets in the past, but nothing as good as this. Suddenly, I had a very complex budget entered, and I was able to make forecasts and updates in real time. The PC was able to do much more than the Amiga with half the memory. Indeed, many of the applications were lean and mean.

 

The DOS operating system looked deceptively simple. In fact, it was very sophisticated, with on-the-fly disk compression, multitasking with TSR's and task swapping, and a sort of GUI file manager called DOS shell. Sure, the multitasking wasn't exactly pre-emptive, but that didn't take anything away from the experience. I could still download in the background while reading my offline mail with the proper software. Indeed, in the final years I used my Amiga, I bypassed the GUI alltogether and dropped to the much more powerful CLI (Command Line Interface).

 

My Amiga sat for months without being turned on, while my PC was hardly ever turned off. Then it occurred to me: While my Amiga was outdated, this '286 was still relevant. I could go anywhere and buy new hardware and software for my PC, while my Amiga 500 got left behind when the Amiga 1200 replaced it. While the Amiga was more technically advanced with its graphics and sound and was certainly a lot prettier to watch, when it came down to the nitty gritty get-er-done type of work, the PC was running circles around the Amiga. Indeed, my Amiga 500 needed a memory upgrade to 1 MB before it could do anything considered useful, while this '286 did perfectly fine with the 640k of RAM it had when it came out of the box.

 

The other thing that occurred to me was the fact that PC's were quite easy to upgrade. While the Amiga's 8 bit sound was superior to the blips and beeps out of my '286, all I had to do was plug in a sound card; it was possible for me to get better sound in the PC with a cheap 16 bit sound card. There was no way to upgrade the Amiga's sound. If I wanted better graphics, I could plug in a VGA card which would rival the graphic abilities of the Amiga. There was no way of upgrading the Amiga's graphics. Hard drives and disk drives were bigger and cheaper.

 

Next thing you know, Commodore went under. With it, they pretty much dragged the Amiga down with them. The future of the Amiga was quite apparent; there was no future for the Amiga. Local support vanished; 3rd party support dried up within the year. Epson made the case and motherboard of my '286; however, if they went out of business, my computer would still be relevant. I could use parts and software from another PC manufacturer. My whole computing experience was not dependant on a single company.

 

It all became painfully apparent. No wonder everyone bought a PC. After using that '286 for a couple of months, the Atari ST's and the Amiga's did look like toys. They were fun, colourful, and entertaining...but the PC delivered where it mattered the most. Ultimately, it was the People's Computer and offered the best bang for the buck.

[ggn]

Well, that's all heartwarming and stuff, but, well, you know, when you look at it realistically, the amiga was just considered a games machine. I'd say that 80-90% of people thought so. So not many apps as the ST market had. And when game companies saw that people are stupid enough to pay a bit more to get a more powerful computer (yeah right, my 16 year old ste is far more reliable than this laptop I'm currently typing), then they abandoned the st/ami games market altogether.

 

In my eyes you fell into the "it's easy to upgrade a pc" trap. Even in nowdays it isn't. Ok, so maybe back then hw didn't have much difference between them and you could barely get away with that (of course, memories of DOS games having support for tens of VGA cards come to mind ). So in essence, Atari and Commodore's fault was that instead of making crap cards with shitty drivers that only ran a fraction of the sw, led to incompatibilities, etc. they instead chose to deliver full computer solutions, as tried and tested as possible. So what if it doesn't run right now? When the sw and drivers get upgraded it will!

 

BTW: upgrade the amiga sound? What was the problem with that? It still sounds great. Oh, you want 16-bit sounds? Yeah, then of course you can plug in a crappy incompatible card in your PC, no denying that.

 

Do I sound grumpy? I used my STE all the time during university (even doing reports with that or using euler instead of matlab to produce graphs). I only borrowed a PC to write my thesis because they wanted it in m$ word format.

 

The DOS operating system looked deceptively simple. In fact, it was very sophisticated, with on-the-fly disk compression, multitasking with TSR's and task swapping, and a sort of GUI file manager called DOS shell. Sure, the multitasking wasn't exactly pre-emptive, but that didn't take anything away from the experience. I could still download in the background while reading my offline mail with the proper software. Indeed, in the final years I used my Amiga, I bypassed the GUI alltogether and dropped to the much more powerful CLI (Command Line Interface).

 

DOS? Sophisticated? Sorry, but to tell you the truth I nearly wet my pants from laughing here.

 

Anyway, rambling off for me (don't think most people will share my views anyway)

[ggn]

Oops, double post, ignore this...

Edited January 5, 2007 by ggn

[tjlazer]

I am sorry but a 286 running DOS would be painful compared to an Amiga and Atari ST with a HD. Yes there were/are more apps and software for the PC but that is where it stopped and sadly that is what mattered to everyoe (hence the PCs survived and CBM/Atari did not) Everyone viewed Commodore and Atari as game home computers, that could not be taken seriously. I hope you can agree that there could of been better software written for the Amiga that would of blown away your amazing 286 experience!!! Quite sad really but I still prefer Atari and Commodore computers...

Edited January 6, 2007 by tjlazer

[DigitalQuirk]

Well, that's all heartwarming and stuff, but, well, you know, when you look at it realistically, the amiga was just considered a games machine. I'd say that 80-90% of people thought so. So not many apps as the ST market had.

 

The thing is, the apps were much better written and worked much better. It wasn't so much that the PC had more apps, but also that they were so much nicer to use.

 

And when game companies saw that people are stupid enough to pay a bit more to get a more powerful computer (yeah right, my 16 year old ste is far more reliable than this laptop I'm currently typing), then they abandoned the st/ami games market altogether.

 

I came to rethink how I consider how "Powerful" a computer is. Is this measured by the speed of the processor? The amount of memory it has? The width of the data bus? Or, is real power measured by the sheer variety of tasks a computer can perform? I would think that an Amiga that could work as a web server would need to be quite powerful to do so; yet there are original 8088-based PC web servers that are up and running today with the DOS operating system. Web browsing would bring my Amiga 500 to its knees even with upgrades, but the Archane browser runs fine on a '286.

 

In my eyes you fell into the "it's easy to upgrade a pc" trap.

 

A trap? I didn't think of it as a trap; I thought of it as liberation. My eyes were opened to the fact that buying a closed system such as an Atari ST or my Amiga was, in fact, the real trap. The only non-Commodore authorized hardware I was able to use was the modem, printer, and joysticks.

 

Even in nowdays it isn't. Ok, so maybe back then hw didn't have much difference between them and you could barely get away with that (of course, memories of DOS games having support for tens of VGA cards come to mind ). So in essence, Atari and Commodore's fault was that instead of making crap cards with shitty drivers that only ran a fraction of the sw, led to incompatibilities, etc. they instead chose to deliver full computer solutions, as tried and tested as possible. So what if it doesn't run right now? When the sw and drivers get upgraded it will!

 

Every VGA card I came across met the VGA standards and worked flawlessly with everything. I do recall some sketchy VESA local bus SVGA cards, but even those would kick back to the old VGA standards.

 

BTW: upgrade the amiga sound? What was the problem with that? It still sounds great. Oh, you want 16-bit sounds? Yeah, then of course you can plug in a crappy incompatible card in your PC, no denying that.

 

The 8 bit 4 channel sound of the Amiga was perfectly fine for video games and diddling around, but what if you wanted to use your computer to generate and manipulate some high quality samples? With only 4 channels, even an amateur musician would become frustrated at such limitations. That's the thing about the PC; it could really be everything to everybody. Again, there were some sketchy sound cards out there, to be sure, but if you went with one of the known brands, there was never a problem.

 

DOS? Sophisticated? Sorry, but to tell you the truth I nearly wet my pants from laughing here.

 

Interestingly, long after the death of the Amiga and the ST's, long after GEM and Workbench have ceased any further chance of being considered "Competitive," DOS lives on. It is still supported by IBM,, DR DOS, and, just like Linux, now sees continued strong support in the Free OS community as Freedos. It is fully capable of running a modern graphical Web browser, and even an original 8088 with DOS is capable of being turned into a web server. Run a graphical web browser on my Amiga? Only with substantial updates; even then, it's still going to pale in comparison with Archane running on a '286 with DOS.

 

The truth of the matter is, DOS can do absolutely anything a GUI interfaced operating system can do, but much, much more efficiently. Yes, it can even multitask; it was capable of doing so before Windows (Windows used DOS extenders to achieve multitasking).

 

A lot of the fallacies people have about DOS are addressed here. The fact that it continues to see use today on modern computer hardware all on its own ought to say something about the sophistication of this deceptively simple looking operating system.

[Christos]

About dos. Due to my work I am forced to use a lot of dos applications. And I tell you that I'll have a gem application anyday. You cannot apply Heisenberg's theory, or more precisely the philosophical applications of it, to computer software. The fact that you were unaware of the functionality, availability and strength of applications written for the 16bit computers of the era doesn't make dos applications better. It is of course a matter of habit or personal preference and in that respect you are probably right. However you are right for yourself and for yourself alone.

The thing is, the apps were much better written and worked much better. It wasn't so much that the PC had more apps, but also that they were so much nicer to use.

I don't agree with you that a spreadsheet written for dos is better than one written for gem in terms of functionality. Or a word processor for that matter. However that again is a matter of personal preference.

 

I came to rethink how I consider how "Powerful" a computer is. Is this measured by the speed of the processor? The amount of memory it has? The width of the data bus? Or, is real power measured by the sheer variety of tasks a computer can perform? I would think that an Amiga that could work as a web server would need to be quite powerful to do so; yet there are original 8088-based PC web servers that are up and running today with the DOS operating system. Web browsing would bring my Amiga 500 to its knees even with upgrades, but the Archane browser runs fine on a '286.

 

I could fine nothing about archane web browser for dos in google. I only found an Arachne web browser that clearly stated that you need a 33Mhz machine with more than 2 Mb's of RAM and a VGA card to do anything useful. In 1993 that setup would set you back a lot more than an Amiga or ST would. And it costed a bit more than my falcon. And again you seem not up to date about the internet capabilities of the ST or the Amiga.

 

A trap? I didn't think of it as a trap; I thought of it as liberation. My eyes were opened to the fact that buying a closed system such as an Atari ST or my Amiga was, in fact, the real trap. The only non-Commodore authorized hardware I was able to use was the modem, printer, and joysticks.

 

I agree with you on the fact that to upgrade an ST or an Amiga was not a trivial task. However you didn't really need to... You said yourself that a 286 can handle browsing very well...

 

Every VGA card I came across met the VGA standards and worked flawlessly with everything. I do recall some sketchy VESA local bus SVGA cards, but even those would kick back to the old VGA standards.

 

I took my cousin to buy a PC and we had to change the VGA card because it wouldn't support the monitor. And IIRC the vga standards changed a couple of times.

 

The 8 bit 4 channel sound of the Amiga was perfectly fine for video games and diddling around, but what if you wanted to use your computer to generate and manipulate some high quality samples? With only 4 channels, even an amateur musician would become frustrated at such limitations. That's the thing about the PC; it could really be everything to everybody. Again, there were some sketchy sound cards out there, to be sure, but if you went with one of the known brands, there was never a problem.

 

You would buy a special product to do that, it was cheaper than a Roland sound card. And most amateur musicians I know used or use an ST or a Mac.

 

Interestingly, long after the death of the Amiga and the ST's, long after GEM and Workbench have ceased any further chance of being considered "Competitive," DOS lives on. It is still supported by IBM,, DR DOS, and, just like Linux, now sees continued strong support in the Free OS community as Freedos. It is fully capable of running a modern graphical Web browser, and even an original 8088 with DOS is capable of being turned into a web server. Run a graphical web browser on my Amiga? Only with substantial updates; even then, it's still going to pale in comparison with Archane running on a '286 with DOS.

 

The truth of the matter is, DOS can do absolutely anything a GUI interfaced operating system can do, but much, much more efficiently. Yes, it can even multitask; it was capable of doing so before Windows (Windows used DOS extenders to achieve multitasking).

 

A lot of the fallacies people have about DOS are addressed here. The fact that it continues to see use today on modern computer hardware all on its own ought to say something about the sophistication of this deceptively simple looking operating system.

 

DOS isn't GUI interfaced, unless you are referring to FREEGEM or another GUI. It could multitask but the dos kernel wasn't multitasking. It can multitask the same way an ST with the Geneva AES would multitask but not even close to preemptive multitasking as offered by Magic or Mint in the ST or amigaOS. And if you think that there aren't any advancements made on GEM or OS you are wrong. And any atari or amiga can be turned into a web server. I don't know why you think they can't.

Reading your posts gave me the impression that your atari and amiga knowledge stopped somewhere in 1989 while you continued to learn about pc's. There are a lot of uninformed opinions in your post.

[ijor]

I agree with much of what you say about PC and DOS. But I don't understand how you reach the conclusion that the popularity of DOS has anything to do with sophistication.

 

I actually think exactly the opposite. The strong point of DOS is its simplicity. For example, you can easily take full control of a PC under DOS.

 

Your statement about Windows multitasking thanks to DOS extenders doesn't make much sense to me either.

 

You actually seem to contradit yourself. You start saying that the power of a computer shouldn't be measured by the technicals. I can't agree more. But then why you insist in saying that DOS is technically powerful.

 

The truth of the matter is, DOS can do absolutely anything a GUI interfaced operating system can do, but much, much more efficiently. Yes, it can even multitask...

 

Can you run multiple tasks concurrently (not just task switching)?

Can you protect one task of not being crashed by another?

[tjlazer]

Interestingly, long after the death of the Amiga and the ST's, long after GEM and Workbench have ceased any further chance of being considered "Competitive," DOS lives on. It is still supported by IBM,, DR DOS, and, just like Linux, now sees continued strong support in the Free OS community as Freedos. It is fully capable of running a modern graphical Web browser, and even an original 8088 with DOS is capable of being turned into a web server. Run a graphical web browser on my Amiga? Only with substantial updates; even then, it's still going to pale in comparison with Archane running on a '286 with DOS.

 

I guess you have not kept up with the Amiga (or Atari for that matter), you can easily run a Web Browser on an Amiga computer, especially with a 68020+, 2MB RAM. The Amiga OS was also updated up to version 3.9 in 2002 with built in TCP stack and web browser, but that is besides the point. Remember a 286 is comparible to a 68020, and NOT a 68000 running at 8MHz. AND If you are able to add a Video Card to the Amiga with the above setup you can quad double the performace of web surfing, I should know.

 

So the only update you would need was a CPU update and some RAM. That would bring you up to the level of a '286 which is understandable. Yes I agree it was harder to upgrade the Amiga but it could be done for a descent price. Maybe not as cheap as the PC but that is what a PC is: cheap!

 

In 1995 I had an Amiga 2000 with Picasso II video card and was able to go online and surf just fine! I used AMosaic. I did eventually get a 68030 @ 25MHz card which helped a lot but like I said any Amiga could do it, but a 020+ was recommended.

Edited January 6, 2007 by tjlazer

[DigitalQuirk]

I could fine nothing about archane web browser for dos in google. I only found an Arachne web browser that clearly stated that you need a 33Mhz machine with more than 2 Mb's of RAM and a VGA card to do anything useful. In 1993 that setup would set you back a lot more than an Amiga or ST would. And it costed a bit more than my falcon. And again you seem not up to date about the internet capabilities of the ST or the Amiga.

 

You are correct, I mistyped the name, but did provide a proper link to Arachne in my post. Documentation clearly states that:

 

"Arachne for DOS will run on i8086 compatible CPU with as little as 475 KB of DOS memory (540 KB if you want PPP connection) and EGA or VGA video card. "

 

It would have run fine on my '286. Naturally, more hardware means it will run better and do more...but it is still quite functional on a minimal '286 with 640k of RAM. Know how many web sites I could visit with my old Amiga 500 with nearly twice the memory? If you guessed none, you guessed right.

 

I was quite painfully aware of what I needed to get my Amiga on the internet.

 

I agree with you on the fact that to upgrade an ST or an Amiga was not a trivial task. However you didn't really need to... You said yourself that a 286 can handle browsing very well...

 

At the time, I was a poor student. I built that '286 system for $100 and could do more with it than I could with my Amiga. I turned around and, after cleaning it up, sold it as a complete system for $200, and used that money to build myself a '386 system with 4 MB of RAM, VGA graphics, and a monochrome VGA monitor. With the $400 I got from selling that complete system, I built from scratch a '486 system with 8 MB of RAM and full color graphics, only running Windows when it was absolutely necessary. Although I could run Windows on that '286 with EGA graphics, it didn't really cost me anything more than my time to source the components necessary to build a newer system.

 

I took my cousin to buy a PC and we had to change the VGA card because it wouldn't support the monitor. And IIRC the vga standards changed a couple of times.

 

Must've been a real oddball card. It is possible to run into that with such an open archetecture. By the way, that reminds me; do you know how many different monitors I could use on my Amiga 500? Only the ones that said Commodore would plug into it, and not all of them. Overpriced ones that always flickered at higher resolutions. Upgrading the video really wasn't viable on the A500 either; I think I recall perhaps one company that offered a rather pricey "Flicker Fixer" solution, that was about it. How I would've loved to simply change a VGA card just to use a modern monitor with it.

 

DOS isn't GUI interfaced, unless you are referring to FREEGEM or another GUI. It could multitask but the dos kernel wasn't multitasking. It can multitask the same way an ST with the Geneva AES would multitask but not even close to preemptive multitasking as offered by Magic or Mint in the ST or amigaOS.

 

There are many graphical interfaces available for DOS, though I never found them necessary. Even on the Amiga, I spent most of my time in CLI; on my Red Hat Linux box, it's the command prompt for me. Modern DOS offerings such as that from DR-DOS do, in fact, offer true pre-emptive multitasking. Your post gives me the impression that your DOS knowledge stopped somewhere in 1989 or so.

 

Reading your posts gave me the impression that your atari and amiga knowledge stopped somewhere in 1989 while you continued to learn about pc's. There are a lot of uninformed opinions in your post.

 

I didn't see any point in following Atari after they killed their computer division, which was around the time when everyone was disappointed at the shortcomings of the Falcon; there was no support in stores nor in educational institutions, only amateur musicians with their MIDI setups continued to use their Ataris. When Commodore deep sixed, I saw the same thing over again...big disappointment with their Amiga 4000, they sat on some great stuff and let it go to waste. Again, with the exception of certain video and broadcast studios, nobody was using or supporting the Amiga anymore. The fact is, Commodore never cared about their customers; they kept overcharging us for an inreasingly inferior product and raped the 3rd party manufacturers on licensing until they lost a lot of 3rd party support and bled the company dry. Why would I commit more to a company than the people who are running it?

 

Don't get me wrong; I agree that the Amiga Workbench and even Atari's GEM (a Digital Research product) had many advantages back in the day...and I can appreciate all operating systems. I just see all this DOS bashing as sour grapes, as it does have certain desirable qualities not found in any other operating system out there. Uneducated DOS bashing does not make GEM, Workbench, or the Mac OS any better.

[DigitalQuirk]

I guess you have not kept up with the Amiga (or Atari for that matter), you can easily run a Web Browser on an Amiga computer, especially with a 68020+, 2MB RAM. The Amiga OS was also updated up to version 3.9 in 2002 with built in TCP stack and web browser, but that is besides the point. Remember a 286 is comparible to a 68020, and NOT a 68000 running at 8MHz. AND If you are able to add a Video Card to the Amiga with the above setup you can quad double the performace of web surfing, I should know.

 

So the only update you would need was a CPU update and some RAM. That would bring you up to the level of a '286 which is understandable. Yes I agree it was harder to upgrade the Amiga but it could be done for a descent price. Maybe not as cheap as the PC but that is what a PC is: cheap!

 

In 1995 I had an Amiga 2000 with Picasso II video card and was able to go online and surf just fine! I used AMosaic. I did eventually get a 68030 @ 25MHz card which helped a lot but like I said any Amiga could do it, but a 020+ was recommended.

 

A PC with an 8088 processor and 640k of RAM can be turned into a web server using the free EZ-NOS server software. Also, the 80286 processor based PC's were released along the same time the MC68000 based computers were introduced; both processors were introduced back in '82. When I bought my brand new A500, it was competing against 80286 PC's. My '286 was technically not as advanced as my Amiga with only half the memory. By 1995, I had already sold my '286, bought and sold my '386, and was running my '486 system, having given up on Commodore just like Commodore's own CEO's did.

[tjlazer]

It would have run fine on my '286. Naturally, more hardware means it will run better and do more...but it is still quite functional on a minimal '286 with 640k of RAM. Know how many web sites I could visit with my old Amiga 500 with nearly twice the memory? If you guessed none, you guessed right.

 

I'm sorry but you do not know what you are talking about. An Amiiga 500 with 512k could get online and do some surfing. With 1MB (Which was a very cheap upgrade for the A500) you could easily go online with AMosaic and use Ami TCP/IP and I bet this setup was much better than a crap 286 PC running MS-DOS and using a DOS browser!!! (I am talking about 1994-5 timeframes herre, you can do more now)

 

The reason you had to have more memory on the Amiga than a PC was because the Amiga was running a far more advanced pre-eptive multitasking OS and GUI interface, where the PC was using a archaic single tasking DOS! And it is amazing that you can do all that with only 512k!

 

Get your facts together!

Edited January 7, 2007 by tjlazer

[DigitalQuirk]

It would have run fine on my '286. Naturally, more hardware means it will run better and do more...but it is still quite functional on a minimal '286 with 640k of RAM. Know how many web sites I could visit with my old Amiga 500 with nearly twice the memory? If you guessed none, you guessed right.

 

I'm sorry but you do not know what you are talking about. An Amiiga 500 with 512k could get online and do some surfing. With 1MB (Which was a very cheap upgrade for the A500) you could easily go online with AMosaic and use Ami TCP/IP and I bet this setup was much better than a crap 286 PC running MS-DOS and using a DOS browser!!! (I am talking about 1994-5 timeframes herre, you can do more now)

 

The reason you had to have more memory on the Amiga than a PC was because the Amiga was running a far more advanced pre-eptive multitasking OS and GUI interface, where the PC was using a archaic single tasking DOS! And it is amazing that you can do all that with only 512k!

 

Get your facts together!

 

AMosaic is going to need minimum Workbench 2.0; once you've booted with Kickstart 2.0 disks and loaded that into memory, then booted up with Workbench 2.0, there won't be any memory left on a 512k Amiga to do anything. I know; I tried switching to WB 2.0 on my A500 with 1MB of RAM, but went back to WB 1.3 because 2.0 used up too much memory to make it useful. I happen to know quite a bit about Amigas and their capabilities, so your attempts at bamboozling me will fail. My facts are, indeed, quite together.

 

Perhaps with another megabyte of fast RAM, it's doable...but in an A500, one needed a controller that supported additional memory; my hard drive controller did not. Also, it wasn't like I could walk into any computer store and buy such a controller; by 1994, there was no store I could go to that carried Amiga hardware. Buying one used would have cost me at least as much buying an entire clone PC used with overall superior capabilities.

 

Don't get me wrong; I think what the Amiga did in its day was very remarkable. However, I find the fact that a computer archetecture and operating system that pre-dates the Amiga eventually surpassed the Amiga in capability even more impressive; partly due to the incompetence and greed of management at Commodore, but also largely due to the open archetecture of the PC.

 

With regards to my remarks about DOS being sophisticated, I was referring to the overall capabilities of the operating system. Modern-day DR-DOS and FreeDOS come with a very comprehensive and sophisticated set of tools that make DOS a very sophisticated operating system that can accomplish anything a modern day OS can do.

[tjlazer]

Well I got my Amiga 600 online, but that has 2MB Chip and no fast ram. Like I said you do need a graphics card and that is where the PC was better as you could easily expand it. If you were lucky to have an Amiga 2000/3000/4000 you had no issues as a graphics card (like a VGA card in a PC) made it possible to view pages without suffering. (ie scrolling on a page is much faster than the onboard graphics) Alas a Kickstart 2.0 or even 3.1 ROM was a cheap upgrade, as was a 512k RAM expansion. See the problem is you had the low end Amiga and you wanted hi end performance. You should of got an Amiga 2000.

 

Comparing a stock Amiga 500 to a 286 PC is really not fair. Both have their good and bad points!

 

Also saying the PC is impressive because it has evolved to what it is today is bogus. The PC is a hack, and anything can be hacked to be modern. Heck there are Amigas and Ataris that have attemped to do that and were quite succesful. But you cannot compare it to todays cutting edge PC as they were small time attempts. (ie Cyberstorm PPC 233MHz card and Cybervision PPC for Amiga 3000/4000's, CT63 060 100MHz card for Atari Falcon) It would be very possible to get a PPC G4/G5 2.0GHz CPU card for an Amiga 3000/4000/Falcon, etc. or any CPU for that matter. The bottom line is the Amiga/Atari would not be as bad as a hackjob as the PC! (ie 640k base memory and xxxx extended memory, etc!!!)

Edited January 8, 2007 by tjlazer