14 ms·
Atari ST in daily use since 1985 [video]
- fifilura 5y agoThe DIY is strong also in the website for the camping! So much love. https://www.bohmerwald.nl/index2019.htm https://www.bohmerwald.nl/index2019.htm
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoHe's avoiding the second system effect.
- fifilura 5y agoHe is also avoiding the HN hug of death!
- jgilias 5y agoNice! If you click on 'Plattegrond', you can actually see the artwork seen in the booking application on Atari!
- mhd 5y agoI think the PDF even has some Print Shop art. And if I read that right, the local computer club is meeting there every first Sunday of the month.
- LeonM 5y ago> And if I read that right, the local computer club is meeting there every first Sunday of the month. The event page hasn't been updated since 2019, so may no longer be true.
- mhd 5y agoNothing ever changes at camp sites. Go there next year, same people, just their children got a bit older and louder.
- amelius 5y agoIs it served from the Atari?
- donw 5y agoHonestly, we've gone backwards in a lot of ways. I remember, in the mid-90s, looking up stuff at a library on a VT100-ish terminal connected via some sort of serial arrangement to a larger computer. Function keys were clearly labeled, searching was fast and worked well. None of the heavier replacement machines ever felt as snappy or as useful.
- mdp2021 5y ago> we've gone backwards in a lot of ways Yes, but not everywhere. For example, mid '90s software of top professional grade keeping the CPU on all the times. One of the differences is that some systems of yore looked more rooted in the engineering mindset, whereas today some perceive a way overly "excessive" (in fact, simply wrongly headed) focus on the dumbest specimen (and not to help it but to celebrate it). Edit: ...so, on a different side, in the old times we could approach technology with full joy, whereas today there are many reasons to approach products with suspect and diffidence.
- deelowe 5y agoJust like anything else unfortunately. Similarly, a good scientific calculator in the hands of an engineer is an indispensable tool, but to the general public, it's a confusing mess. The early internet was designed by and for the people who knew what they were looking for and simply needed the tools to find it.
- mdp2021 5y ago"You, deserving engineer, can now have the slimmest scientific calculator on the market" (after a review read years ago that declared the reviewer and the buyers wanted paper-thin telephones)
- bregma 5y agoModern engineering calculators have streamlined the design and done away with numbers and function buttons. You just hold them in your hand and pose while looking at the ads displayed on the screen.
- hnbad 5y agoThis brings me back. My first computer as a kid was an Atari ST. Near the end he stumbles through words trying to explain that he replaced the floppy disk drive. It sounds like he replaced it with USB? I wonder how that worked.
- mnd999 5y agoSounds a bit like the gotek drives popular with Amiga modders.
- hnlmorg 5y agoFloppy disk emulator. Loads of them about and they're used everywhere from old synthesisers that store presets on floppy disk to retro computers of varying platforms. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=floppy+disk+emulator&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=floppy+disk+emulator&iax=im...
- Borrible 5y agoWhat a mean moustache Mr.Bos cultivated! Ah, those where the days my friend. The days of manly man and physical manuals. Or the other way 'round. Have to have a visit, when I'm nearby. I send'em a mail with a link to this thread.
- epaga 5y agoThat was my first real computer as a kid, where I learned basic programming (GFA BASIC!), played my first games. It was such a great machine. I also love his self-made program with a little map of the camping grounds. Such attention to little details. No wonder he didn't want to give that system up for a newer computer: what for?
- a-dub 5y agosame here! such fun! i wrote my first "network" game on the atari st, two machines with crossed midi cables would present arithmetic problems and correct solutions moved avatar cars across both screens. ...because writing a networked computer "game" for learning arithmetic was obviously more fun than doing arithmetic drills.
- mr_sturd 5y agoFrom my memory, I'm most impressed that the mouse has survived all this time.
- thom 5y agoI always thought the mouse itself was built like a tank, but I do remember having to regularly wiggle the connector in various directions until it settled in a position that continued to work.
- qsi 5y agoI had to clean the button switches every once in a while, and IIRC one of them failed on me completely.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoThey were actually notoriously unreliable. I went 6 months without one for lack of money to replace mine. Using the ST without a mouse involved holding the Alt and arrow keys down, and man did that suck.
- chris_j 5y agoYour comment brings back long buried memories of the time that my ST mouse broke and I had to save up for a new one. Hearing the ST keypress sound repeating as the mouse slowly moved across the screen, 8 pixels at a time, and then having to do SHIFT+ALT+ARROW when you wanted to position the mouse pointer with pixel-level accuracy...
- kebman 5y agoThe M1 Abrams is actually just a modified copy of that mouse!11
- jacquesm 5y agoThere were some pretty good trackball options for the ST as well with a trackball of 50 mm.
- mastazi 5y agoReminds me of that Commodore 64 still in use in Poland at a car repair shop (at least, it was in use as of 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqA8YBwwCl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqA8YBwwCl0 Edit: the YT video cites this as the source (in Polish): https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Warszatat-samochodowy-zaslynal-dzieki-26-letniemu-komputerowi-Commodore-n106004.html https://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Warszatat-samochodowy-z... A source in English https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/09/polish-auto-shop-still-runs-off-a-commodore-64/ https://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/09/polish-auto-shop-still-run...
- jamal-kumar 5y agoI'm pretty sure I found an even older IBM pc from the 80s in Costa Rica in an auto parts store that I need to get evidence of... that one was supposedly used since 1994?
- skocznymroczny 5y agoWhile Commodores are rare, there are many stores in Poland that still run DOS era software for store management.
- NegativeLatency 5y agoMy car repair shop runs some software for billing on DOS box currently (Portland, OR)
- Cosi1125 5y agoThis musician still uses a 1040 STE for making his music [1]. In the video (in Polish, unfortunately) he describes his setup: extended RAM, SD card reader, etc. [1] https://youtu.be/mlR08iVHiFY?t=68 https://youtu.be/mlR08iVHiFY?t=68
- jacquesm 5y agoCubase (now Steinberg Cubase) started out on the ST.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoAs did Logic.
- zbuf 5y agoNot just any old musician, here's Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) in his studio in 2018: Still with Atari ST switched on, connected to the gear, and loading in old floppies of "The Rockerfeller Skank" from the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLjgXPDzeZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLjgXPDzeZo YouTube commentor says "it's like a living museum that should be kept alive" ... agree!
- pjmlp 5y agoAnd in fact, if it wasn't for modern Web pages, ray tracing like graphics or modern network protocols, most of the Amiga and Atari generation computers could be easily used for most of the school and office work going on in 2021.
- Underphil 5y agoI often think about this. We do clearly waste CPU cycles by the boatload these days, but what would the carbon footprint be like if we were still using these machines now? How does the power consumption compare? How would it compare if we were still using the protocols and languages of the past? (I'm not an 'everything was better in the old days' kinda guy, but I do think about this just as a curiosity).
- pjmlp 5y agoRegarding the languages it is easy, hence the pressure of going back to AOT or at very least JIT caching across runs. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/04/11/facebook-and-cpp/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/04/11/facebook-and-cpp/ > One reason Facebook is shifting more work to C++ is to reduce operating costs such as power consumption per user.
- zozbot234 5y agoGood reference, but that post is from 2012. There are better choices nowadays. Language-provided memory safety also allows you to run more of your code within a single address space (barring information disclosure concerns, aka Spectre/Meltdown of course) - this is effectively what modern "async" programming is. Not that different from the kind of code you would write for a random 16-bit machine.
- erosenbe0 5y agoWhat is modern async programming? I/O multiplexing with the select system call came out in 1983 and async programming has been exactly the same ever since. Edit: I misunderstood your 16-bit comment. Yes, in the 80s and 90s async was popular like it is today because processes were expensive. Even on 32-bit. So multiplexing was a good strategy whether in a preemptive OS like SunOS or a cooperative OS like 16 bit Windows. Then Java and various web server architectures came along and people got comfortable with threads, and the OSes got relatively efficient with them.
- tommek4077 5y agoHow can he write software without JavaScript and pulling 1500 arbitrary packages from npm? Is this even real?
- Underphil 5y agoI know, right? How did he fit Electron into 1Mbyte of RAM?
- goldenkey 5y agoSimple, it's a thin client! ;-)
- iforgotpassword 5y agoBut that means it can fit even less!
- rbanffy 5y agoI laughed while I was screaming inside.
- tempodox 5y agoThe beefed-up version gets to a whopping 4 MiB! OTOH, having to abuse the MIDI port for network connectivity makes downloads rather slow. And how many floppy disks would Electron require?
- zandorg 5y agoI had Ultima 6 for the Atari ST. Running off floppies was kind of slow. My friend's Atari ST machine had 4MB of memory. So I set up a 3MB RAM disk. And installed the game to 'hard disk' with the RAM disk as the hard disk. Then all I had to do was format some floppies to really high density. The entire U6 installation fitted on (I think) 2 floppies. I also used a rapid file copy program. I copied the files to RAM disk, played the game, saved the game, quit the game, and saved the files back to floppies. Just thought it would interest someone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tragomaskhalos 5y agoI love the part where he compares it to the PC and says he can finish his task on the Atari in the time it takes the PC to boot up. Similarly on uptime, he just turns it on at the start of the season, leaves it running 24/7 and powers down months later. Beautiful.
- kwanbix 5y agoI remember travelling to NY with my father for turism, but also taking the opportunity to buy an original ibm PC XT for 5000 dollars, which was half of what it costed at my home country. IBM PC AT with a powerful 286 was already out but much more expensive. And we were too newbies to know that we could get a PC clone. Anyway, I remember there was both the Amiga and the Atari ST. But my father wanted an IBM. You know, nobody got fired for buying IBM ;)
- rbanffy 5y agoI have very little respect for the IBM PC. It was huge, heavy, loud, slow (writing characters via the BIOS had to wait for the blanking intervals on CGA or you’d get “snow”). My Apple II booted up faster, loaded programs faster and could print to the screen faster than the monitor could refresh.
- specialist 5y agoYa. At the time, I was an Apple partisan. I just could not understand how the PC XT was more successful than the Apple, Atari, and Commodore computers. With hindsight, it was probably my first experience with "worse is better". A phenomenon I still don't understand, frankly. JavaScript? ffs. -- There was one exception. My bestie's dad bought a HeathKit/Zenith Z-150 kit. That was kinda cool. https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://www.ljkrakauer.com/LJK/80s90s/heathkit.htm https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFlyer https://archive.org/details/ZenithDataSystemsZ-150PcSalesFly...
- joakleaf 5y agoI think, what is often overlooked as to why the PC won the market is exactly its hi-res textmodes; 1) The BIOS was insanely slow yes. But on the other hand it was really fast when you wrote to the screen memory directly (address $B8000). An entire screen in 720x400 resolution VGA, was represented by just 80x25x2=4000 bytes (2 bytes per char code + color attributes). A single plane bitmat graphics mode (just black and white) in same resolution would be 36000 bytes. So scrolling through documents/spreadsheets was very fast compared to graphics modes, which most other platforms used. And screens used less memory. The simple text-modes were also really easy to develop for. 2) The high-res text (720x400x16) and graphics modes (640x480x16) on VGA were non-interlaced (unlike e.g. the first Amigas), so they felt more solid and you could work with them longer before getting tired.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoI bought my 1040st, and a dot matrix printer, with most of my first year's student loan. (Almost all of it.) I was so embarrassed I told no one, even my girlfriend at first. It was a big expensive secret. My car was a Chevette, with a bad tranny. Anyone in their right mind would have bought a better car. Not one teacher could differentiate type written papers, from dot matrix. Besides the fear of public speaking, I always worried a teacher would find out I didn't write my paper on a twpewritter. I tried to get my girlfriend to like it, but it was a big No. I remember drawing, in Paint, a penis. I even got it to vibrate. (It was not easy back then.) She thought it was cute, and we had sexy time, but she didn't like the machine. I could just tell she didn't like my computer. In retrospect--maybe she thought I should spend that kind of money on her?. I remember thinking, I'm a glad about equal rights. After all she was from a wealthy family, and I was poor. (sorry about reminiscing.) Now most of you think it was my dick pic, but it wasen't. I think she thought the computer was nerdy? She wasn't happy with my Bullmastiff either, but I loved my dog. She didn't like it when my dog had her period. She once said to me, "It's the dog, or me?". I didn't say anything, but my Elsa was my family. It was no decision to be made. I would have died for that dog. I don't think we ever liked each other, but boy was she attractive. She's now some big wig at a computer company, and consultes on computing. I only bought it for word processing. I wasen't a computer guy. I just knew at the time college was a joke, and if I was going to write all those useless papers; I wasen't going to do it on a IBM, with Whitout. I felt like I was cheating. Got my degrees. Had a nervous breakdown. The world seemed grey, and depressing. I got tired of looking at that horrid beige idle computer on my desk one day, and tossed it all. (I'm color blind, but thought that beige was horrid.) I wish I kept it now though. (I miss my dog, and computer. My girlfriend not so much, but she was stunning. Way out of my league.)
- englishrookie 5y agoI had the exact same use case for my parents' camp site in France. In 1997, I had programmed a camp site management software for the Atari 1040 ST in GFA Basic. It was used for booking reservations, registering new guests, and printing invoices. At the time, this solution (both the computer and the programming language) were already outdated by at least 5 years. But it was the cheapest solution for my parents, since they couldn't afford a new computer (having just started the camp site). Of course, it took me hundreds of hours to complete the software but I didn't mind since the project allowed me to sharpen my programming chops at a pretty basic level. For instance, I had to implement my own scrolling routine (there were no text areas in GFA Basic). Theoretically it should have been possible to make system calls to GEM routines (the UI library in ROM) in GFA Basic, but I never got it to work. The computer was used until 2005 or so, when the disk drive gave out. [edit: grammar]
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoCalling into GEM from GFA Basic was dubious because GEM AES made heavy use of void pointers, casting, and other C-isms. GFA was of course a garbage collected interpreted language. So GFA had its own wrappers for a bunch of stuff, but not everything. It was an excellent basic though. With a top-notch IDE-like editor with auto-complete, auto-indentation, folding, etc. I tried for years to find a similar experience with other languages on Linux, etc.
- pjmlp 5y agoI think something was lost during the last decades. There we were using a mix of high level languages, with some C and Assembly along the way. Some of us have watches more powerfull than they were, and yet there is this resitence to use more developer friendly languages like those used to be. Like, probably someone would tell you that using Basic to code an ESP32 would be wrong, yet you experienced how good the development experience felt like in a similarly constrained hardware.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoI think these days the JetBrains IDEs are as good or better than GFA's was. And as far as language, Python or Ruby are fairly close in experience. I fired up GFA on an ST a few years ago just to relive the experience, and it wasn't as good as I remembered :-)
- jacquesm 5y agoWe used them in the first generation of Style's lathe and mill CNC controller and some of those are also still in use in the most foul industrial environments. I know this because every now and then a monitor burns out and then questions will pop up on how to source a replacement. Those are 1040STs, sometimes with piggybacked extra memory to give them 2M, it's funny how the build quality of those machines was so bad that it wasn't rare to have one DOA from new, but once past the 90 days they pretty much last forever.
- englishrookie 5y agoYep, we purchased one in 1988 which died on us after about a week. But the replacement we got under the warranty lasted until 2005 or so (see my other post here), when the disk drive gave out. I flunked my 9th grade in high school because of this machine.
- RamRodification 5y agoMakes me really anxious with regards to backups. I really hope he has that covered. Both with regards to data and a system to run the software on. But I think he mentioned being able to run it in an emulator on the PC so it's probably fine as long as he actually has the data backed up.
- tempodox 5y agoHa, lucky break. I had to decommission mine after 10 years of use because the carbon layer on the keyboard wore off and some keys didn't make contact any more. I still remember the heartbreak. That machine was immensely hackable. You could just malloc(), write 68k instructions into it and execute that stuff. I built my first JIT compiler on the ST. That word didn't even exist back then.
- jamal-kumar 5y agoI found some IBM computers running with green phosphor screens doing some database for inventory management at an auto parts store in Costa Rica one time. I need to go back and get a video of that, it was ultra impressive, but it's basically in the sketchiest part of town -- I'm not there at the moment but maybe any locals could collaborate, es por la parada de buses x leon 13 al centro chepe JAJA
- NKosmatos 5y agoMy first computer was an Atari 65XE, the smaller 8-bit sibling of the ST series. Almost everything that was produced back then was well build and still runs today (even my 65XE). Atari means “about to win” and the history of the company is very interesting [0]. In the "old" days there was great competition in Europe between Atari, Amstrad, Sinclair, Commodore and later on Amiga. You can see a very nice timeline of home/personal computers in [1] and [2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari [1] https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline//entry/501712/Personal-Computers/ https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline//entry/501712/Personal-Co... [2] https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/ https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/
- CTOSian 5y agoI really miss the ST's mono monitor, was a pleasure to use it, esp for CAD and DTP.
- keithnz 5y agoI had the Atari 800 XL and then the Atari STE... both were good, the real the thing that seemed to keep the STs around for a long time after that generation had given way to PCs was the MIDI port and the music software.... I saw them years and years afterwards for that purpose.
- TacticalCoder 5y agoEspecially back when PCs out there where still all super noisy: silent PSUs / fans etc. wasn't a thing. So in music studios many would still rock Atari STs for they were totally silent even though we were well into the PC age.
- RalfWausE 5y agoAs i am also one of the weird guys using (or better now: has been using) totally outdated tech for daily work for years now (especially an 520 ST), i cannot recommend one modern operating system more then Haiku. Haiku has everything i loved (and still love!) about the 16 Bit machines of the 80s / 90s (simple, snappy gui, incredible fast boot time etc.). I imagine if Atari or Amiga had survived the 90s, their OSes would look and feel like that.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoThe ST was a wonderfully practical computer. Nobody could beat the price/performance and price/memory for it at the time. An ST with a monochrome monitor was a beautiful Mac-like word processing or DTP or MIDI sequencer system with an excellent (for the time) high resolution paper-like display, GUI. For 1/3rd the price of a PC/Mac. The ST is often compared to the Amiga, but I don't feel like this is the right comparison point. It should be compared to the Mac and PC as productivity machines. Yes, the ST could play games and do colour multimedia stuff, but it did not do it as well as the Amiga. But the Amiga shipped with an interlaced monitor, had longer boot times, cost more, shipped with less memory, and its software market focus was not so much on productivity. I learned a lot on my ST. By the time I replaced it with a 486 I was running a UUCP node and a Unix-like shell and OS extension on it (MiNT) and learning the basics of Unix.
- mwexler 5y agoLike the 800/400 before it, and the Amiga, this generation of computers had such great tech hidden under such layers of junk. Hidden gems all over the place in these systems. Well worth some effort to learn how they delivered such power at a time when mainstream PCs were struggling with CGA graphics.
- narrator 5y agoI was watching a YouTube video a while ago about some 80s industrial band touring in the late 2010s. I forget which. In order to play all the synth tracks live they had to dig out an Atari ST and load up the sequencer software on it with floppies containing midi tracks and samples. It's hard to believe the floppies didn't die after all those years.
- mattbee 5y agoThey also have a web site and it's exactly what you'd hope for https://www.bohmerwald.nl https://www.bohmerwald.nl (the HTML must be from a 1990s version of Word!)