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”I don’t recall seeing Atari specifically market the Mega ST to developers, but I suspect a lot of developers found the better keyboard and extra RAM to be wort
by pavlov 1y ago
”I don’t recall seeing Atari specifically market the Mega ST to developers, but I suspect a lot of developers found the better keyboard and extra RAM to be worth the upgrade.”
There wasn’t such a thing as a general developer market.
When you didn’t have internet and cloud services and free Unix, how could you develop for something else than a specific platform and device?
If you bought a Mega ST to write programs, your target audience were still only the people who had a regular ST. You couldn’t reach anyone else. So the advantage was minimal.
The idea that there can be a developer market separate from the baseline end-user platform is quite new. It emerged around 2007-2010 when web apps became a realistic option and you didn’t have to be on Windows to target the 90% of people who are on Windows.
- rocky1138 1y agoAs a counter point, Doom was developed on a different platform than the target. Let's say that the lead dev was ahead of the curve.
- bdcravens 1y agoTo say that John Carmack was ahead of the curve is quite an understatement lol
- schlupa 1y agoI bought a Mega ST2 because I studied CS and wanted to become a developper. I sold the Amiga 500 my father had bought me. The ST was cheaper for programming than the Amiga 500 as you would need to add, at least a second floppy and a lot of memory. Furthermore, I hated Workbench the GUI of the Amiga (for the same reason I hated also Windows 3.1, you had to use a special program to access the files on the drives, you had icons in the windows only if you had drawn specifically a special icon, I preferred how on GEM and the Mac Finder, windows would directly show what's on the disk).