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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

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.
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      Another the reason the non-68k market was so fragmented was because of the internal politics and coup against Tramiel inside Commodore. Atari Corp only existed (and produced a 68k) because of his departure. Along with some key engineers. The Atari ST is in large part Shiraz Shivji's design, after coming over from Commodore where he worked on various things including the C64 and one of the ill-fated "business" computers that CBM was making. I'm not sure what Commodore would look like if the Tramiels had stayed, though. It may have imploded in other ways. And Commodore under him really didn't seem to get software/platforms/compatibility. Also the ST didn't get placement inside studios just because of the MIDI ports. It was also because it was a) $cheap$ b) completely reliable solid timing [no multitasking helps there] c) had a fairly Mac-like GUI d) the top-notch paper white 640x400 (pretty good resolution for the time) monochrome monitor & mode. It also wouldn't have done well in studios if it weren't for the German software scene and the development of Steinberg's Cubase and e-Magic's Notator. The ST was popular in Germany. Most of the really good software came out of there (see also Calamus DTP) Gluing a MIDI port into the Amiga wouldn't necessarily had brought that set of happenstances to the Amiga.
- j45 2y ago
  Calamus was light years (maybe even decades) ahead of anything else. It was pretty feature complete, so much so that it could probably be used today as-is. People who used it likely felt a drop off, even to something like Pagemaker, etc.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
It's true the ST had almost no presence in that market. The Tramiels I think wanted to get in there and really shake it up, but they made some mis-steps. GDOS (part of GEM with proportional fonts etc) not shipping with the original machine was a huge mistake for one. Still Calamus + the cheap Atari laser printer was a pretty amazing piece of DTP kid for the people who got it. That and it was simple to just turn your ST into a Macintosh. But with higher resolution and slightly higher clock speed.
bregma 2y ago
The profesional publishing revolution was on the Macintosh. I worked in that industry and I experienced it. The Apple LaserWriter was a proofer the size of a washing machine and cost more than a diamond engagement ring and it probably hung off a Mac II running A/UX and acting as a (Appletalk) network spooler. That's not the stuff of a desktop revolution. The desktop publishing revolution came when average Joe Schmoe could whip off a (almost) professional-looking typeset zine on his home desktop computer. That was An Atari ST, and Atari SLM, and Calamus.

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.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Another the reason the non-68k market was so fragmented was because of the internal politics and coup against Tramiel inside Commodore. Atari Corp only existed (and produced a 68k) because of his departure. Along with some key engineers. The Atari ST is in large part Shiraz Shivji's design, after coming over from Commodore where he worked on various things including the C64 and one of the ill-fated "business" computers that CBM was making. I'm not sure what Commodore would look like if the Tramiels had stayed, though. It may have imploded in other ways. And Commodore under him really didn't seem to get software/platforms/compatibility. Also the ST didn't get placement inside studios just because of the MIDI ports. It was also because it was a) $cheap$ b) completely reliable solid timing [no multitasking helps there] c) had a fairly Mac-like GUI d) the top-notch paper white 640x400 (pretty good resolution for the time) monochrome monitor & mode. It also wouldn't have done well in studios if it weren't for the German software scene and the development of Steinberg's Cubase and e-Magic's Notator. The ST was popular in Germany. Most of the really good software came out of there (see also Calamus DTP) Gluing a MIDI port into the Amiga wouldn't necessarily had brought that set of happenstances to the Amiga.
j45 2y ago
Calamus was light years (maybe even decades) ahead of anything else. It was pretty feature complete, so much so that it could probably be used today as-is. People who used it likely felt a drop off, even to something like Pagemaker, etc.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

It's true the ST had almost no presence in that market. The Tramiels I think wanted to get in there and really shake it up, but they made some mis-steps. GDOS (part of GEM with proportional fonts etc) not shipping with the original machine was a huge mistake for one. Still Calamus + the cheap Atari laser printer was a pretty amazing piece of DTP kid for the people who got it. That and it was simple to just turn your ST into a Macintosh. But with higher resolution and slightly higher clock speed.

bregma 2y ago

The profesional publishing revolution was on the Macintosh. I worked in that industry and I experienced it. The Apple LaserWriter was a proofer the size of a washing machine and cost more than a diamond engagement ring and it probably hung off a Mac II running A/UX and acting as a (Appletalk) network spooler. That's not the stuff of a desktop revolution. The desktop publishing revolution came when average Joe Schmoe could whip off a (almost) professional-looking typeset zine on his home desktop computer. That was An Atari ST, and Atari SLM, and Calamus.