Why I Love The Atari ST

[youxia]

2 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Not a rant, just an opinion based on personal experiences which I believe is informative, some of us dealt with many different

systems back then, some good, some bad and the PC was not one of the good ones but somehow managed to survive to what

it is today.

Sorry, but saying that "PC before Windows XP was a joke", being snarky about the importance of PC gaming in the early 90s, or painting some simple config edits as sorcery is anything but informative. It indicates that the poster either hasn't got a clue, or that the tribal allegiances cloud his vision.

 

I was there as well, as an Amiga owner, but that did not stop me - and most of the other microcomputer users - of appreciating the PC's undeniable strengths and jumping the ship when the time came. PCs weren't perfect, of course, but they did not end up dominating the scene by accident or conspiracy. It didn't happen "somehow", but for a host of very good reasons. We all have our favourite machines, but I simply cannot understand why it's not possible to celebrate them all, instead of spinning some lame good/evil narratives (don't worry, many people in the Amiga also love doing it, only difference is that they dump on the ST as well).

 

Edited July 7, 2021 by youxia

[calimero]

I love my Atari ST because editing text looks like this:

 

 

(with many different alphabets at once, very important since I am from Yugoslavia)

 

and not like this:

 

 

I simple did not need to wait for Bill Gates to "bring the future" (like he said in video from my previous post).

 

I did not need to wait for Windows to use all this fine programs: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=22856

that come to PC from other platforms as soon as PC finally become "good enough"...

 

 

[calimero]

btw

Douglas Adams gave fine explanation what happen to our civilization:

 

"The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place."

 

http://www.gksoft.com/a/fun/dna-on-microsoft.html 

 

While we are at Douglas Adams, I strongly suggest to watch his 1990. "Hyperland" documentary: 

 

 

 

[zzip]

20 minutes ago, youxia said:

Sorry, but saying that "PC before Windows XP was a joke", being snarky about the importance of PC gaming in the early 90s, or painting some simple config edits as sorcery is anything but informative. It indicates that the poster either hasn't got a clue, or that the tribal allegiances cloud his vision.

 

I was there as well, as an Amiga owner, but that did not stop me - and most of the other microcomputer users - of appreciating the PC's undeniable strengths and jumping the ship when the time came. PCs weren't perfect, of course, but they did not end up dominating the scene by accident or conspiracy. It didn't happen "somehow", but for a host of very good reasons. We all have our favourite machines, but I simply cannot understand why it's not possible to celebrate them all, instead of spinning some lame good/evil narratives (don't worry, many people in the Amiga also love doing it, only difference is that they dump on the ST as well).

 

Liking PC gaming doesn't mean you have to like the OS.   I mean coming from a 68000 environment and going to DOS with its segmented memory model, where the burden is on the end-user to handle memory management didn't feel like a step backwards to you?   DOS was pre-internet for most people, so you couldn't just Google all the flags that each line in config.sys needed, so it may as well have been sorcery for most people.  I certainly couldn't write a config.sys from scratch,  I was trusting TSR installers to do the right thing when they added lines, and copying entries from working systems.   Then used memmaker to reorganize it.

 

Windows 9.x took most of that burden away from users, but that didn't make those versions of Windows great, they suffered stability issues and its "wizards" would often do the wrong thing.

[ClassicReplay]

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

Although certified on some Windows systems SQL Server etc.(out of date now) , I always loved the power of Unix and

what you could do with it's shell scripting tools, even fairly recently I needed to do a massive search/replace in hundreds

of files, under windows it was becoming a nightmare and looked like it would take days to complete,

so I loaded up Cygwin64 wrote the shell scrips and job done in about 1/2 hour.

Piece of cake in Powershell. But yes, I used to be an AIX and Tivoli admin and it was powerful shizzle 

[ClassicReplay]

5 minutes ago, zzip said:

Liking PC gaming doesn't mean you have to like the OS.   I mean coming from a 68000 environment and going to DOS with its segmented memory model, where the burden is on the end-user to handle memory management didn't feel like a step backwards to you?   DOS was pre-internet for most people, so you couldn't just Google all the flags that each line in config.sys needed, so it may as well have been sorcery for most people.  I certainly couldn't write a config.sys from scratch,  I was trusting TSR installers to do the right thing when they added lines, and copying entries from working systems.   Then used memmaker to reorganize it.

 

Windows 9.x took most of that burden away from users, but that didn't make those versions of Windows great, they suffered stability issues and its "wizards" would often do the wrong thing.

I loved all that config.sys and Himem.sys sorcery. Although I can hardly remember it now, I became a whizz at it and would help others configure there’s to help run their latest games like a peach ? 

[ClassicReplay]

7 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

I could never understand why large businesses went for Windows, especially for servers, Windows 2000 ☠️ was the kiss of

death to any project, we had a mix of Win2000 and a load of AIX (Unix) servers, any problems, I guarantee you it

would be a Win2000 server that had crashed (again...) , the Unix machines did all the hard work and just worked.

That’s not my experience of AIX, especially when talking to underlying SAN storage. But yes, certainly better than Windows of the day. I still argue that Novell Netware was the best, if only they could have invested in a decent client, there’d be no such thing as Microsoft. 

[TGB1718]

7 minutes ago, ClassicReplay said:

Piece of cake in Powershell. But yes, I used to be an AIX and Tivoli admin and it was powerful shizzle 

Yes, pretty sure PowerShell could do it, but I never really got to grips with it, (really no need other than the occasional fix to a non booting system)

My toolbox was filled with Unix shell scripting

 

[TGB1718]

1 minute ago, ClassicReplay said:

if only they could have invested in a decent client, there’d be no such thing as Microsoft. 

I think you hit the nail on the head there, essentially there was nothing like the PC to use as a client,

although on AIX we did use a terminal where the application (Ingres Windows) ran on the server.

 

Did you ever see any of the DEC Alpha systems, they were so advanced not sure why DEC eventually faded from the scene,

I remember using one of their huge disk arrays, it contained over 200 SCSI disk drives the unit was huge, probably 5 foot square,

6 feet high with a 3 foot diameter cooling fan in the middle.

[calimero]

9 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:

Yes, pretty sure PowerShell could do it, but I never really got to grips with it, (really no need other than the occasional fix to a non booting system)

My toolbox was filled with Unix shell scripting

 

Does PowerShell, like DOS prompt, when you ask for “date”, return date in format that is set in Windows Control Panel?!

...So your scripts get broken if you change Time/Date format...  very professional

Edited July 7, 2021 by calimero

[zzip]

12 minutes ago, TGB1718 said:

Yes, pretty sure PowerShell could do it, but I never really got to grips with it, (really no need other than the occasional fix to a non booting system)

My toolbox was filled with Unix shell scripting

 

I never picked up Powershell either.   Found it was easier to install Python and have a scripting language that could do anything I needed on Windows.

[ClassicReplay]

24 minutes ago, zzip said:

I never picked up Powershell either.   Found it was easier to install Python and have a scripting language that could do anything I needed on Windows.

C# is better for all things Windows in my humble opinion, but doesn’t really matter. 

[ClassicReplay]

33 minutes ago, calimero said:

Does PowerShell, like DOS prompt, when you ask for “date”, return date in format that is set in Windows Control Panel?!

...So your scripts get broken if you change Time/Date format...  very professional

You can build powershell in any Windows environment including a VM and then it’s up to you how you configured all aspects of the environment. If it goes wrong, it’s down to individual and how you have setup Windows. 

[MrMaddog]

 

Page 2 and I forgot which computer we're talking about already...

 

[+Sauron]

I didn't get my first Atari ST until the early 90s, having upgraded from a 130XE, but it sure seemed like a big upgrade to me in a lot of ways. I was already accustomed to using a GUI thanks to the Mac XL computers (Lisa computers converted to Macs) that my school had, and my 1040ST gave me a taste of that at home while costing only a fraction of the price. Using it for writing school papers was far easier than trying to do the same with my 130XE, and in fact I could even swap out disks with my mom's Tandy 1000RL when I needed to transfer files for any reason. I couldn't run most of the latest and greatest PC games, but I had friends who had decent PCs, so that wasn't that big of an issue for me. Besides, there were still a ton of great ST games that I spent many, many hours with. The biggest downside to it was the lack of software availability, as by the time I got my ST there weren't any stores in my city selling software for it, so I had to wait to buy software until my next trip to San Antonio, which was fortunately a frequent occurrence for my family. Still, the ST was a great system for its time thanks to being a system having modern (for the time) features that cost much less than most of its competitors.

 

[zzip]

9 hours ago, Sauron said:

The biggest downside to it was the lack of software availability, as by the time I got my ST there weren't any stores in my city selling software for it, so I had to wait to buy software until my next trip to San Antonio, which was fortunately a frequent occurrence for my family.

I was resorting to mail-order for software by 1990,  the local stores were carrying very little by then.

 

The ST actually had quite a lot of software though.   When I got to college, one of my roommates turned out to be a fellow ST user and a pirate,  he had shoeboxes full of cracked ST games,  many I never even knew existed!  I was shocked at how much there was.    I think a lot of the games came from Europe, where the ST was much more popular.

[+Sauron]

11 hours ago, zzip said:

I was resorting to mail-order for software by 1990,  the local stores were carrying very little by then.

 

The ST actually had quite a lot of software though.   When I got to college, one of my roommates turned out to be a fellow ST user and a pirate,  he had shoeboxes full of cracked ST games,  many I never even knew existed!  I was shocked at how much there was.    I think a lot of the games came from Europe, where the ST was much more popular.

Funny you mention that. I ended up coming across a small group that didn't belong to the local user group that had tons of cracked software, which was how I was able to get ahold of quite a bit of stuff. Granted, many of the games were in French or German, but that did little to stop my enjoyment of them. Also had a good number of MIDI Maze parties with that same group of people.