10 ms·

The Jackintosh: A Real GEM – Remembering the Atari ST

108 points by empressplay 8y ago

Fins 8y ago
I've earned a decent living doing DTP on Ataris (1040STFM first, TT030 later) all the way through 1995 or so. Back then there were some DTP/graphics software that was miles ahead of anything available on Mac,let alone PC back then. I haven't really followed that field closely since then, but it seems some of the features Calamus or Didot had back then still aren't available in mainstream packages even now...
- robarr 8y ago
  Sane hwre. CalamCalamus was over the top dtp for those times. I know there was a PC running thru an emulator (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP)) Did you ever tried Arabesque for vector graphics?
  - Fins 8y ago
    There also was a native Windows NT (including MIPS and Alpha builds) port of Calamus; I helped beta-test it. I mostly used Retouche Pro and Didot Line Art, but Arabesque was pretty good, too.
- skissane 8y ago
  > but it seems some of the features Calamus or Didot had back then still aren't available in mainstream packages even now What specific features are you talking about?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    They actually worked in the way you'd expect them to work. For the life of me I still can't get two lines of text to line up in almost every other package, it is most frustrating. Present day DTP/Layout software makes me long for either ATEX or typewriters.
  - Fins 8y ago
    Stochastic rasterization, virtual copies, step kerning, real WYSIWYG down to a printer pixel level, good perfromance on a 32MHz 68030...
marktangotango 8y ago
Shawn Hargreaves first created the allegro game library on Atari st that was eventually ported to dos, windows and everything else. It had GUI framework inspired by GEM. That was my gateway drug for software development. Really straight forward and easy to comprehend stuff. We’ve lost a lot imo.
- jchw 8y ago
  Maturity comes with a lot of costs. Try making a lightweight GUI framework that supports accessibility, bidirectional text, IME, multiple and different kinds of pointing devices, renders all kinds of Unicode script, DPI scaling, hardware acceleration, and so much more... I absolutely miss those days, but only a little :) I just shrug and use Qt and be happy that at the very least, after I've fought the framework for a couple hours, an incredible amount of engineering is done on such difficult problems without me needing to try to solve them on my own in each project.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    The vast majority of the time you don't need all (or most of) that stuff though. None of the applications i actually use take any advantage of accessibility (i do not need it), bidirectional text (most all of the text i see and write is in English and all of it is in left-to-right order), IME (i do not write in any language that needs this), multiple pointing devices (i only have a single mouse), all kinds of unicode script (as i said most of the text is in English, but i'll have a note on that below), DPI scaling (i prefer 1:1 mapping of units to pixels ratio and none of my monitors are hidpi and i plan on avoiding getting one as long as it is technically possible since i want to have the pixels visible), hardware acceleration (i do not think any GUI toolkit that uses traditional buttons/checkboxes/inputfields/sliders/etc style uses hardware acceleration, at least in the modern sense where it means using 3D hardware as opposed to the older 2D acceleration - some toolkits that try to reinvent Flash are probably using 3D acceleration more but i do not use any programs that use those) or any "much more". The note i mentioned above and a small exception is unicode support, but that is externally imposed: sometimes i download files (like an album i bought on bandcamp) that use unicode characters which display weirdly if the program you use cannot handle them. But beyond that, no real need for it and this is only in a few types of programs. Of course my needs are not the same as others' needs, but i am "paying" for stuff i do not use nor need, both in terms of complexity and actual resources.
a-dub 8y ago
This machine was my gateway drug. Dirt cheap and awesome. GFA Basic and MicroC (?) were really fun. Also programmable MIDI ports. Also, home to one of the first multiplayer networked first person shooters ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze
- jacquesm 8y ago
  GFA Basic was very powerful, for C I would have recommended Mark Williams C.
- oso2k 8y ago
  Micro-C from David Dunefield/DDS?
- bungie4 8y ago
  I miss GFA to this day.
- le-mark 8y ago
  Nice, I had not heard of GFA Basic. I'm somewhat of a BASIC afficiando, what was most compelling about it, in your opinion (those who used it?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC
  - spiralx 8y ago
    Proper code blocks, record types, typed variables, auto-indenting editor, blazingly fast interpreter, built-in commands for OS and hardware features, functions and subroutines, an actual compiler if you wanted it... It was far beyond what any other BASIC could offer, and made the jump to Turbo Pascal relatively easy.
ggm 8y ago
I have this memory of The University of York (uk) compsci getting these and doing truly awesome stuff. But, we had like whitechapels, and Suns, and Decstations, and Perq, and.. these tiny odd boxes with slidy-sideways function keys.. wut? WhuT???? And then people were coding sprites, and stuff which looked like what became mgr -> plan9 and amazing stuff. I missed out. I totally did not get it, or the zeitgeist. The road not taken. Damn.
jhbadger 8y ago
It's kind of ironic that the Atari ST was developed in part by a number of ex-Commodore people, while the Commodore Amiga was likewise developed in part by a number of ex-Atari people.
- indigodaddy 8y ago
  Source for the latter claim?
  - pkaye 8y ago
    From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner >In the early 1980s, Jay, along with other Atari staffers, had become fed up with management and decamped. They set up another chipset project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have creative freedom.
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      The original Amiga staffers were not pleased with Commodore's leadership after the buyout. Early versions of AmigaOS had an Easter egg where you could get it to display "We made the Amiga...and Commodore fucked it up!" Later on it was quietly changed to "Commodore: A Tradition Of Excellence" or something along those lines.
GeekyBear 8y ago
I worked at a computer/software store in the mall that sold the Atari ST (and other computers of the era) while I was in college. I can still remember the reaction you would get when you told people whose Ataris had gone haywire that the quick fix for units whose chips were coming unseated from the motherboard was to pick the computer up, hold it level, and then drop it from about a four inch height.
- kabdib 8y ago
  To be fair the Apple ]I[ (and IIRC, the Lisa) had similar issues. One of those computers had socketed chips mounted upside down, with predictable results . . . and a 3 inch drop wouldn't fix that issue :-/
  - analog31 8y ago
    I worked at an Apple repair facility that was part of a large county agency serving public school districts. We didn't charge a minimum fee, so we typically did the job while you watched. Pushing all of the chips back into the motherboard was called "the laying on of hands." The other quick fix was taking a pencil eraser to the edge connector of the disc controller board, which was known to use inferior gold plating. I remember people were horrified when the IBM PC came out with soldered-in chips, but IBM published a solid report showing that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.
    - Zenst 8y ago
      Oh IBM's first MCA PS/2 PC's had a wonderful issue in some models. They used a daughter card to present the expansion slots. Many had a habit of placing the monitor upon the top of the case (as was norm back then) and a gentle tap would momentarily wiggle that daughter card due to the case bearing the monitors weight and cause the system to lock right up. Solution - don't put the monitor upon the PC case was not a happy solution for many, but was the solution.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  In all fairness, this was a completely normal thing for the socketed chips from that era: dropping the entire thing was easier than opening it up and pushing on all of the chips. And even now, if you are wondering why a particular thing is having problems, and it has any socketed chips, you should push on them.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
GeekyBear 8y ago
There's a pretty good oral history of the founding of the company and it's early years that was posted this weekend: https://medium.com/s/story/ataris-hard-partying-origin-story-an-oral-history-c438b0ce9440 https://medium.com/s/story/ataris-hard-partying-origin-story...
walrus01 8y ago
Question, can the PC/x86 version of GEOS run in QEMU or Virtualbox? Or does it directly address 80286 hardware in such a way that it's not easy to emulate?
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  Even if it doesn't you may be able to get it working with PCem or 86box (fork of PCem which is a bit more user friendly).
- paride5745 8y ago
  OpenGEM is included in FreeDOS:" http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=opengem http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=opengem
  - paride5745 8y ago
    Fixed link: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/opengem.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dis...
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Hmm, now to find a web browser...
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
I recently read a book about Commodore's downfall and it's clear that its disappearance was due to a lack of future vision and future planning in Jack Tramiel's part. He got lucky with the Commodore 64 and was looking for the next big hit. Rather than to develop the company while keeping its customers happy, he focused on short-term profits. He had no idea what to develop for the company's customers. So he hoped a new hit would save the company. Commodore owned the market for home computers. Commodore's customers would have stayed loyal to the company if they could have gotten a product that moved the Commodore technology forward but they could not advance the technology. They saw sales decline and decided to find another hit rather than to advance the technology. When he moved on to Atari he developed a great machine but he just did not know how to move forward the same way he did not know with Commodore.
- laumars 8y ago
  It's easy to Tramiel for not having vision but what you're describing simply wasn't a thing in that era. Computers were silos which where hardware incompatible with one another. And the few instances where a next gen machine was build with support for its predecessors, that generally harmed the successor more than helped as fewer developers wrote bespoke software for the newer platform (why would you when you could target all versions of the product line instead of just the lastest machine?). However that didn't stop Atari from having a go with the many revisions of the ST and, later, the Falcon. Plus the ST and C64 were largely sold as games machines (yes, I'm aware of the popularity of using the ST as a MIDI sequencer etc) and consoles of that era didn't follow an upgrade path either (baring the Atari 7800 being largely hardware compatible with the 2600 but the 7800 wasn't exactly a success because of that). Many accounts of history actually look more favourably on Jack Tramiel as they argue that had the American Commedore offices taken his lead (like the European division did) and sold the Amiga in toy stores as well as the usual places - as the Atari ST was sold in Toys R Us across Europe - then the Amiga might not have flopped in the US. And there is good reason to believe Tramiel's strategy worked as the ST was a massive hit and the Amiga had a lot more success in Europe and America after the European division of Commedore started copying Tramiel's business strategy. Ultimately though, few hardware manufacturers from that era survived. Even Apple nearly went under (several times in fact, Microsoft had to bail them out on one occasion just to avoid a desktop monopoly). And IBM didn't exactly do well out of upgradeable machines as the market just got flooded with cheap clones which IBM got no cut from. So it's very easy to blame Tramiel with hindsight but in reality he was one of the few which had multiple successes.
thomasfl 8y ago
I remember creating a small widget application for Atari ST that drawed rounded corners on the screen to make it look more like Macintosh. Together with the Geneva font, it was very similar to Macintosh. It was a great computer.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  For more info on the thinking behind the original Mac roundrects design: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
teddyh 8y ago
Since articles nowadays seem to like talking about things instead of showing them, here are some actual screenshots: http://toastytech.com/guis/tos.html http://toastytech.com/guis/tos.html
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Ah, GEM. I always got stuck at why three colours? You're using 2 bits depth, why not give people the fourth colour!
- bluedino 8y ago
  Having that fourth color (in CGA that would be magenta) makes things look terrible. It was an artistic decision to have black, white, and a single color.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    That makes no sense - the fourth colour could have been any in the ST palette. Choose appropriately for artistic reasons. Pick either a highlight colour (orange as on the Amiga and whatever early Unix desktop I once used), or a complementary colour (maybe grey?). CGA was awful for many reasons, one of which was that all colours were fixed.
bmaupin 8y ago
For more interesting reads on the Atari ST, I recommend The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/tag/atari-st/ https://www.filfre.net/tag/atari-st/

108 points by empressplay 8y ago

Fins 8y ago

I've earned a decent living doing DTP on Ataris (1040STFM first, TT030 later) all the way through 1995 or so. Back then there were some DTP/graphics software that was miles ahead of anything available on Mac,let alone PC back then. I haven't really followed that field closely since then, but it seems some of the features Calamus or Didot had back then still aren't available in mainstream packages even now...

robarr 8y ago
Sane hwre. CalamCalamus was over the top dtp for those times. I know there was a PC running thru an emulator (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP)) Did you ever tried Arabesque for vector graphics?
- Fins 8y ago
  There also was a native Windows NT (including MIPS and Alpha builds) port of Calamus; I helped beta-test it. I mostly used Retouche Pro and Didot Line Art, but Arabesque was pretty good, too.
skissane 8y ago
> but it seems some of the features Calamus or Didot had back then still aren't available in mainstream packages even now What specific features are you talking about?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  They actually worked in the way you'd expect them to work. For the life of me I still can't get two lines of text to line up in almost every other package, it is most frustrating. Present day DTP/Layout software makes me long for either ATEX or typewriters.
- Fins 8y ago
  Stochastic rasterization, virtual copies, step kerning, real WYSIWYG down to a printer pixel level, good perfromance on a 32MHz 68030...

marktangotango 8y ago

Shawn Hargreaves first created the allegro game library on Atari st that was eventually ported to dos, windows and everything else. It had GUI framework inspired by GEM. That was my gateway drug for software development. Really straight forward and easy to comprehend stuff. We’ve lost a lot imo.

jchw 8y ago
Maturity comes with a lot of costs. Try making a lightweight GUI framework that supports accessibility, bidirectional text, IME, multiple and different kinds of pointing devices, renders all kinds of Unicode script, DPI scaling, hardware acceleration, and so much more... I absolutely miss those days, but only a little :) I just shrug and use Qt and be happy that at the very least, after I've fought the framework for a couple hours, an incredible amount of engineering is done on such difficult problems without me needing to try to solve them on my own in each project.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  The vast majority of the time you don't need all (or most of) that stuff though. None of the applications i actually use take any advantage of accessibility (i do not need it), bidirectional text (most all of the text i see and write is in English and all of it is in left-to-right order), IME (i do not write in any language that needs this), multiple pointing devices (i only have a single mouse), all kinds of unicode script (as i said most of the text is in English, but i'll have a note on that below), DPI scaling (i prefer 1:1 mapping of units to pixels ratio and none of my monitors are hidpi and i plan on avoiding getting one as long as it is technically possible since i want to have the pixels visible), hardware acceleration (i do not think any GUI toolkit that uses traditional buttons/checkboxes/inputfields/sliders/etc style uses hardware acceleration, at least in the modern sense where it means using 3D hardware as opposed to the older 2D acceleration - some toolkits that try to reinvent Flash are probably using 3D acceleration more but i do not use any programs that use those) or any "much more". The note i mentioned above and a small exception is unicode support, but that is externally imposed: sometimes i download files (like an album i bought on bandcamp) that use unicode characters which display weirdly if the program you use cannot handle them. But beyond that, no real need for it and this is only in a few types of programs. Of course my needs are not the same as others' needs, but i am "paying" for stuff i do not use nor need, both in terms of complexity and actual resources.

a-dub 8y ago

This machine was my gateway drug. Dirt cheap and awesome. GFA Basic and MicroC (?) were really fun. Also programmable MIDI ports. Also, home to one of the first multiplayer networked first person shooters ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze

jacquesm 8y ago
GFA Basic was very powerful, for C I would have recommended Mark Williams C.
oso2k 8y ago
Micro-C from David Dunefield/DDS?
bungie4 8y ago
I miss GFA to this day.
le-mark 8y ago
Nice, I had not heard of GFA Basic. I'm somewhat of a BASIC afficiando, what was most compelling about it, in your opinion (those who used it?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFA_BASIC
- spiralx 8y ago
  Proper code blocks, record types, typed variables, auto-indenting editor, blazingly fast interpreter, built-in commands for OS and hardware features, functions and subroutines, an actual compiler if you wanted it... It was far beyond what any other BASIC could offer, and made the jump to Turbo Pascal relatively easy.

ggm 8y ago

I have this memory of The University of York (uk) compsci getting these and doing truly awesome stuff. But, we had like whitechapels, and Suns, and Decstations, and Perq, and.. these tiny odd boxes with slidy-sideways function keys.. wut? WhuT???? And then people were coding sprites, and stuff which looked like what became mgr -> plan9 and amazing stuff. I missed out. I totally did not get it, or the zeitgeist. The road not taken. Damn.

jhbadger 8y ago

It's kind of ironic that the Atari ST was developed in part by a number of ex-Commodore people, while the Commodore Amiga was likewise developed in part by a number of ex-Atari people.

indigodaddy 8y ago
Source for the latter claim?
- pkaye 8y ago
  From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner >In the early 1980s, Jay, along with other Atari staffers, had become fed up with management and decamped. They set up another chipset project under a new company in Santa Clara, called Hi-Toro (later renamed to Amiga Corporation), where they could have creative freedom.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    The original Amiga staffers were not pleased with Commodore's leadership after the buyout. Early versions of AmigaOS had an Easter egg where you could get it to display "We made the Amiga...and Commodore fucked it up!" Later on it was quietly changed to "Commodore: A Tradition Of Excellence" or something along those lines.

GeekyBear 8y ago

I worked at a computer/software store in the mall that sold the Atari ST (and other computers of the era) while I was in college. I can still remember the reaction you would get when you told people whose Ataris had gone haywire that the quick fix for units whose chips were coming unseated from the motherboard was to pick the computer up, hold it level, and then drop it from about a four inch height.

kabdib 8y ago
To be fair the Apple ]I[ (and IIRC, the Lisa) had similar issues. One of those computers had socketed chips mounted upside down, with predictable results . . . and a 3 inch drop wouldn't fix that issue :-/
- analog31 8y ago
  I worked at an Apple repair facility that was part of a large county agency serving public school districts. We didn't charge a minimum fee, so we typically did the job while you watched. Pushing all of the chips back into the motherboard was called "the laying on of hands." The other quick fix was taking a pencil eraser to the edge connector of the disc controller board, which was known to use inferior gold plating. I remember people were horrified when the IBM PC came out with soldered-in chips, but IBM published a solid report showing that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.
  - Zenst 8y ago
    Oh IBM's first MCA PS/2 PC's had a wonderful issue in some models. They used a daughter card to present the expansion slots. Many had a habit of placing the monitor upon the top of the case (as was norm back then) and a gentle tap would momentarily wiggle that daughter card due to the case bearing the monitors weight and cause the system to lock right up. Solution - don't put the monitor upon the PC case was not a happy solution for many, but was the solution.
greglindahl 8y ago
In all fairness, this was a completely normal thing for the socketed chips from that era: dropping the entire thing was easier than opening it up and pushing on all of the chips. And even now, if you are wondering why a particular thing is having problems, and it has any socketed chips, you should push on them.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

GeekyBear 8y ago

There's a pretty good oral history of the founding of the company and it's early years that was posted this weekend: https://medium.com/s/story/ataris-hard-partying-origin-story-an-oral-history-c438b0ce9440 https://medium.com/s/story/ataris-hard-partying-origin-story...

walrus01 8y ago

Question, can the PC/x86 version of GEOS run in QEMU or Virtualbox? Or does it directly address 80286 hardware in such a way that it's not easy to emulate?

badsectoracula 8y ago
Even if it doesn't you may be able to get it working with PCem or 86box (fork of PCem which is a bit more user friendly).
paride5745 8y ago
OpenGEM is included in FreeDOS:" http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=opengem http://www.freedos.org/software/?prog=opengem
- paride5745 8y ago
  Fixed link: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/opengem.html https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/dis...
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Hmm, now to find a web browser...

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

I recently read a book about Commodore's downfall and it's clear that its disappearance was due to a lack of future vision and future planning in Jack Tramiel's part. He got lucky with the Commodore 64 and was looking for the next big hit. Rather than to develop the company while keeping its customers happy, he focused on short-term profits. He had no idea what to develop for the company's customers. So he hoped a new hit would save the company. Commodore owned the market for home computers. Commodore's customers would have stayed loyal to the company if they could have gotten a product that moved the Commodore technology forward but they could not advance the technology. They saw sales decline and decided to find another hit rather than to advance the technology. When he moved on to Atari he developed a great machine but he just did not know how to move forward the same way he did not know with Commodore.

laumars 8y ago
It's easy to Tramiel for not having vision but what you're describing simply wasn't a thing in that era. Computers were silos which where hardware incompatible with one another. And the few instances where a next gen machine was build with support for its predecessors, that generally harmed the successor more than helped as fewer developers wrote bespoke software for the newer platform (why would you when you could target all versions of the product line instead of just the lastest machine?). However that didn't stop Atari from having a go with the many revisions of the ST and, later, the Falcon. Plus the ST and C64 were largely sold as games machines (yes, I'm aware of the popularity of using the ST as a MIDI sequencer etc) and consoles of that era didn't follow an upgrade path either (baring the Atari 7800 being largely hardware compatible with the 2600 but the 7800 wasn't exactly a success because of that). Many accounts of history actually look more favourably on Jack Tramiel as they argue that had the American Commedore offices taken his lead (like the European division did) and sold the Amiga in toy stores as well as the usual places - as the Atari ST was sold in Toys R Us across Europe - then the Amiga might not have flopped in the US. And there is good reason to believe Tramiel's strategy worked as the ST was a massive hit and the Amiga had a lot more success in Europe and America after the European division of Commedore started copying Tramiel's business strategy. Ultimately though, few hardware manufacturers from that era survived. Even Apple nearly went under (several times in fact, Microsoft had to bail them out on one occasion just to avoid a desktop monopoly). And IBM didn't exactly do well out of upgradeable machines as the market just got flooded with cheap clones which IBM got no cut from. So it's very easy to blame Tramiel with hindsight but in reality he was one of the few which had multiple successes.

thomasfl 8y ago

I remember creating a small widget application for Atari ST that drawed rounded corners on the screen to make it look more like Macintosh. Together with the Geneva font, it was very similar to Macintosh. It was a great computer.

robin_reala 8y ago
For more info on the thinking behind the original Mac roundrects design: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

teddyh 8y ago

Since articles nowadays seem to like talking about things instead of showing them, here are some actual screenshots: http://toastytech.com/guis/tos.html http://toastytech.com/guis/tos.html

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Ah, GEM. I always got stuck at why three colours? You're using 2 bits depth, why not give people the fourth colour!

bluedino 8y ago
Having that fourth color (in CGA that would be magenta) makes things look terrible. It was an artistic decision to have black, white, and a single color.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  That makes no sense - the fourth colour could have been any in the ST palette. Choose appropriately for artistic reasons. Pick either a highlight colour (orange as on the Amiga and whatever early Unix desktop I once used), or a complementary colour (maybe grey?). CGA was awful for many reasons, one of which was that all colours were fixed.

bmaupin 8y ago

For more interesting reads on the Atari ST, I recommend The Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/tag/atari-st/ https://www.filfre.net/tag/atari-st/