4 ms·

I chose an ST because the Amiga was too expensive, the Mac didn't have colour and was very very expensive, and the PC was a wretched business-use-only text-only

by bregma 2y ago

I chose an ST because the Amiga was too expensive, the Mac didn't have colour and was very very expensive, and the PC was a wretched business-use-only text-only waste of desk space. I had a 1040 STe. I rigged up a hard drive (the Atari ST had what was effectively a SCSI bus built in, it just needed a small adaptor board to adjust some signals). Installed MiNT (a multitasking operating system extension) and the GNU tools and was in developer heaven. The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). It was also a leading light in the music industry: I had a copy of Cubase v1.0 (a DAW), which was available only on the ST with its built-in MIDI out and MIDI through ports. Unfortunately the company was run by the Tramiel family so it didn't really stand a chance. Then a couple of hears ago a derecho destroyed the drive shed where I kept all my old computers and I lost my ST. No more Time Bandits.

wslh 2y ago
My father, who currently doesn't know how to send a message via WhatsApp, was very presient (businesswise) in the 80s and had two Macs with a printer, and one 1040 STs with another printer on his printing shops. Just now, after your comment, I realized how weird was to have a 1040 ST in a printing shop instead of only Macs. He was also lucky on having a few people deciding on the technical and cost side.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
Music I agree but... > The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). I actually worked in the DTP industry. I did both write and typeset books. Everything professional and semi-professional was made on Macintosh. You'd enter a bookstore and easily 99%+ of the books and magazines were typeset on Mac. I don't remember the Atari ST as having a particularly good or influential font story neither. I mean: yup, I was typeseting my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets on my Amiga. Doesn't mean it was a revolution. The DTP revolution was the Macintosh.
- ofrzeta 2y ago
  I don't say you are wrong but there was a DTP story on the ST with Calamus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) (maybe more popular in Europe than in the US)
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    The Amiga also had some good DTP software (PageStream, Pro Page, ...) but Commodore not wanting to invest a dime in anything beyond the strictly necessary for a gaming machine (no hi res monitor included, no high bitrate audio, no MIDI interface, no stock harddisk, heck... not even a built in RTC chip! ...etc.) pretty much condemned it to fail although lots of software for other uses beside gaming was already there. The MIDI interface alone would have cost cents to Commodore to add; I built mine using parts salvaged from surplus boards, but parts were cheap and as there was demand I also made some money building and selling them as I did with parallel port audio samplers. Amiga users weren't just gamers or scene developers/musicians; many of them were professionals wanting more from their machine, but Commodore simply didn't care, and when PCs and consoles filled the gap they tanked.
    - ChainOfFools 2y ago
      I used to be (and still am) one of the biggest Amiga fans anyone is likely to encounter, but I have to concede that the Amiga's graphics architecture was ergonomically terrible for the vast majority of dtp work. Most people found working in the only native resolution really suitable for dtp, interlaced 640x400, to be intolerable to look at for even mildly extended periods of time. Things were even worse in europe, with the lower 50/25ihz vertical scan rates. The non-interlaced modes otoh had too low of a vertical resolution and the pixels were far too oversquare or rectangular to render many fonts accurately. It took far too long to come up with effective solutions for this, and the ones that did exist, like the A2024 grayscale square-ish megapixel pixel display, noninterlaced, were too late and had too many compromises. The Amiga had an uphill battle against the head start mac enjoyed ( and seemed, to the casual observer, rather naturally suited to with its crisp black and white display) in DTP to begin with, and without a native laser printing, a good scanning solution, enforcdd UI consistency through quickdraw and most of all adobe, there was never a reasonable chance that it would seriously challenge Apple in that market. The unsuitability of a very visibly interlaced display to fine detail black and white layout work insured it would never be tolerated by people who had to work with such tools 8 hours a day. Totally agree about the absence of a pennies per unit midi port as being a damnable error on Commodore's part; likely one of the main reasons the non-pc market was fatally fragmented three ways instead of a possibly manageable two, and gifting the ST (which was in all other respects an admirable me-too effort at best), a lifeline by which wedge itself into the nascent multimedia production market, which really would have been better off entirely associated with one or two platforms rather than two/three.
Max-q 2y ago
The trio Amiga, ST and Macintosh all had music software, DTP and graphics, but I think they ruled one craft each: The ST became the king of MIDI. The Amiga was the queen of gfx and video. Machintosh created and ruled the DTP revolution. Still, they had so much in common. If the three companies had made one OS and all standardized on the Amiga chipset, they could have won over the IBM PC. Of course, back then, they didn't know how the PC would crush them all, at that time the three thought they were each others biggest competitors.
- snek_case 2y ago
  It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple accelerated 2D graphics. It feels like a wasted opportunity.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    this article actually explain it. they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.
  - sixothree 2y ago
    It was literally a matter of expansion and upgradability. People saw it as a “micro” with vendor lock in.
  - ChainOfFools 2y ago
    And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.
    - beagle3 2y ago
      It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking. The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.
1oooqooq 2y ago
that's funny to read being from outside the usa. the pc were the best thing one could get that was not a commodore or a bootlegged import chiclet keyboard from the uk. the amigas were considered just expensive game machines. the apples were an extremely expensive status symbol, and the you felt like a fool because there was no compatible peripheral anywhere. and the Ataris were unheard of.
- deaddodo 2y ago
  > that's funny to read being from outside the usa. Idk where outside the USA you are, but the IBM PC easily had the easiest time taking over the USA. Amiga and Atari were considered hobbyist computers while Macintosh constantly battled DOS until slowly fading to irrelevancy between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, not regaining real steam until Mac OS X 10.2-10.4. The TI series was very common on the super low-end/hobbyist end, and Sinclair/Coco/Dendy/Timex/etc derivatives had negligible marketshare.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Different places offered vastly different experiences. In Brazil we had mostly Sinclair, Apple II and TRS-80 (Model III and CoCo) clones and compatibles. PC clones were very expensive and only appeared later - and only became popular through smugglers, about the same time MSX 1.0 was introduced. I believe there was only one MSX 2 machine that was actually sold. Brands like Atari, Commodore and Apple were extremely rare. This was all because the military dictatorship reasoned, somewhat correctly, that in order to grow an indigenous industry, it'd need to prevent imports of small computers and heavily tax other segments.
    - jecel 2y ago
      Some more details about Brazil - all imports were banned at the time to deal with the external debt crises. What was special about micro and mini computers was that foreign companies were forbidden from making them locally and selling them (like the did with cars, electronic goods and many other products). So clones dominated the market completely. The Sinclair and TRS-80 clones arrived in 1981, the Apple II in 1982 and the PC XT in 1983 (at the absurd cost of US$15K for a configuration that would be US$5K in the US. This dropped to around US$3K by late 1984 for a configuration of similar price as the US, so not the "many times more expensive" that most people remember). There were very few TRS Color Computer clones, a single Sinclair Spectrum and the single Macintosh clone was not never authorized (every computer launch had to be approved by the government). The two MSX officially arrived in 1985 but sales actually started in 1986. The PC AT clones only started selling in 1987 and 386 machines in 1989 - these were the longest delays of all. An even longer delay was in PC graphics, which were stuck at CGA from 1983 all the way to 1992 (with imports allowed there was a jump to VGA+Multisync). With the exception of the Spectrum and Mac clones by companies that had invested heavily in their predecessors, nobody tried to copy machines with custom chips, so no Ataris, Commodore 64s, Amigas, etc. The Commodore Pet would have been easy to clone, but there was no preexisting market of contraband machines due to the awkwardness of lugging the built-in monitor. After the reserved policy ended in 1991 a company called PCI do Amazonas brought the Amiga to Brazil and was officially still making the A1200 months after Commodore itself had shut down. So we did get one of the three 68000 machines, even if very late.

by bregma 2y ago

wslh 2y ago

My father, who currently doesn't know how to send a message via WhatsApp, was very presient (businesswise) in the 80s and had two Macs with a printer, and one 1040 STs with another printer on his printing shops. Just now, after your comment, I realized how weird was to have a 1040 ST in a printing shop instead of only Macs. He was also lucky on having a few people deciding on the technical and cost side.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

Music I agree but... > The ST was responsible for the desktop publishing revolution with a very affordable laser printer peripheral (although I couldn't afford one, it cost almost as much as a basic Macintosh). I actually worked in the DTP industry. I did both write and typeset books. Everything professional and semi-professional was made on Macintosh. You'd enter a bookstore and easily 99%+ of the books and magazines were typeset on Mac. I don't remember the Atari ST as having a particularly good or influential font story neither. I mean: yup, I was typeseting my Dungeons & Dragons character sheets on my Amiga. Doesn't mean it was a revolution. The DTP revolution was the Macintosh.

ofrzeta 2y ago
I don't say you are wrong but there was a DTP story on the ST with Calamus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamus_(DTP) (maybe more popular in Europe than in the US)
- squarefoot 2y ago
  The Amiga also had some good DTP software (PageStream, Pro Page, ...) but Commodore not wanting to invest a dime in anything beyond the strictly necessary for a gaming machine (no hi res monitor included, no high bitrate audio, no MIDI interface, no stock harddisk, heck... not even a built in RTC chip! ...etc.) pretty much condemned it to fail although lots of software for other uses beside gaming was already there. The MIDI interface alone would have cost cents to Commodore to add; I built mine using parts salvaged from surplus boards, but parts were cheap and as there was demand I also made some money building and selling them as I did with parallel port audio samplers. Amiga users weren't just gamers or scene developers/musicians; many of them were professionals wanting more from their machine, but Commodore simply didn't care, and when PCs and consoles filled the gap they tanked.
  - ChainOfFools 2y ago
    I used to be (and still am) one of the biggest Amiga fans anyone is likely to encounter, but I have to concede that the Amiga's graphics architecture was ergonomically terrible for the vast majority of dtp work. Most people found working in the only native resolution really suitable for dtp, interlaced 640x400, to be intolerable to look at for even mildly extended periods of time. Things were even worse in europe, with the lower 50/25ihz vertical scan rates. The non-interlaced modes otoh had too low of a vertical resolution and the pixels were far too oversquare or rectangular to render many fonts accurately. It took far too long to come up with effective solutions for this, and the ones that did exist, like the A2024 grayscale square-ish megapixel pixel display, noninterlaced, were too late and had too many compromises. The Amiga had an uphill battle against the head start mac enjoyed ( and seemed, to the casual observer, rather naturally suited to with its crisp black and white display) in DTP to begin with, and without a native laser printing, a good scanning solution, enforcdd UI consistency through quickdraw and most of all adobe, there was never a reasonable chance that it would seriously challenge Apple in that market. The unsuitability of a very visibly interlaced display to fine detail black and white layout work insured it would never be tolerated by people who had to work with such tools 8 hours a day. Totally agree about the absence of a pennies per unit midi port as being a damnable error on Commodore's part; likely one of the main reasons the non-pc market was fatally fragmented three ways instead of a possibly manageable two, and gifting the ST (which was in all other respects an admirable me-too effort at best), a lifeline by which wedge itself into the nascent multimedia production market, which really would have been better off entirely associated with one or two platforms rather than two/three.

Max-q 2y ago

The trio Amiga, ST and Macintosh all had music software, DTP and graphics, but I think they ruled one craft each: The ST became the king of MIDI. The Amiga was the queen of gfx and video. Machintosh created and ruled the DTP revolution. Still, they had so much in common. If the three companies had made one OS and all standardized on the Amiga chipset, they could have won over the IBM PC. Of course, back then, they didn't know how the PC would crush them all, at that time the three thought they were each others biggest competitors.

snek_case 2y ago
It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple accelerated 2D graphics. It feels like a wasted opportunity.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  this article actually explain it. they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.
- sixothree 2y ago
  It was literally a matter of expansion and upgradability. People saw it as a “micro” with vendor lock in.
- ChainOfFools 2y ago
  And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.
  - beagle3 2y ago
    It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking. The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.

1oooqooq 2y ago

that's funny to read being from outside the usa. the pc were the best thing one could get that was not a commodore or a bootlegged import chiclet keyboard from the uk. the amigas were considered just expensive game machines. the apples were an extremely expensive status symbol, and the you felt like a fool because there was no compatible peripheral anywhere. and the Ataris were unheard of.

deaddodo 2y ago
> that's funny to read being from outside the usa. Idk where outside the USA you are, but the IBM PC easily had the easiest time taking over the USA. Amiga and Atari were considered hobbyist computers while Macintosh constantly battled DOS until slowly fading to irrelevancy between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, not regaining real steam until Mac OS X 10.2-10.4. The TI series was very common on the super low-end/hobbyist end, and Sinclair/Coco/Dendy/Timex/etc derivatives had negligible marketshare.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Different places offered vastly different experiences. In Brazil we had mostly Sinclair, Apple II and TRS-80 (Model III and CoCo) clones and compatibles. PC clones were very expensive and only appeared later - and only became popular through smugglers, about the same time MSX 1.0 was introduced. I believe there was only one MSX 2 machine that was actually sold. Brands like Atari, Commodore and Apple were extremely rare. This was all because the military dictatorship reasoned, somewhat correctly, that in order to grow an indigenous industry, it'd need to prevent imports of small computers and heavily tax other segments.
  - jecel 2y ago
    Some more details about Brazil - all imports were banned at the time to deal with the external debt crises. What was special about micro and mini computers was that foreign companies were forbidden from making them locally and selling them (like the did with cars, electronic goods and many other products). So clones dominated the market completely. The Sinclair and TRS-80 clones arrived in 1981, the Apple II in 1982 and the PC XT in 1983 (at the absurd cost of US$15K for a configuration that would be US$5K in the US. This dropped to around US$3K by late 1984 for a configuration of similar price as the US, so not the "many times more expensive" that most people remember). There were very few TRS Color Computer clones, a single Sinclair Spectrum and the single Macintosh clone was not never authorized (every computer launch had to be approved by the government). The two MSX officially arrived in 1985 but sales actually started in 1986. The PC AT clones only started selling in 1987 and 386 machines in 1989 - these were the longest delays of all. An even longer delay was in PC graphics, which were stuck at CGA from 1983 all the way to 1992 (with imports allowed there was a jump to VGA+Multisync). With the exception of the Spectrum and Mac clones by companies that had invested heavily in their predecessors, nobody tried to copy machines with custom chips, so no Ataris, Commodore 64s, Amigas, etc. The Commodore Pet would have been easy to clone, but there was no preexisting market of contraband machines due to the awkwardness of lugging the built-in monitor. After the reserved policy ended in 1991 a company called PCI do Amazonas brought the Amiga to Brazil and was officially still making the A1200 months after Commodore itself had shut down. So we did get one of the three 68000 machines, even if very late.