30 Jan
2010
30 Jan
'10
2:51 p.m.
Also, the fact that Atari used the same format/fat scheme as standard
IBM disks, with just some minor nuances which in later versions of TOS
made it fully compatible, this was a God send, since it allowed
sneaker-net exchanging of data between PC's and ST's and with low cost,
simple upgrades like ATSPEED, which allowed a simple daughterboard
install, gave ST's full speed IBM compatibilty, and having PC compatible
floppies was the icing on the cake.
What was truly the ST's major flaw was its display, while obviously a
huge improvement for its time of 85', once the Amiga and Apple Mac II
computers hit the scene with far higher resolutions and deeper on-screen
at the same time color palletes, the ST's really began to lag. This
was further compounded by the very slow introduction of upgrades to the
Atari TOS, small incremental changes were made, while the Amiga OS and
especially the Mac OS made large, noticable jumps in their features...
this further hindered the ST's which quickly lost their polish and shine
in the competing marketplace.
Curt
Geoff Oltmans wrote:
I think one thing in particular that the Atari ST had
an advantage with was the addition of the hard disk/dma port. It made adding a hard disk a
lot cheaper. Hard disk controllers on the Amiga were astronomical.
On Jan 29, 2010, at 10:27 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
It was
Shiraz's design, and it was following the same "power without
the price" methodology they did back at Commodore with the vic20 and
C64. At least according to them. Although the ST's main competitor
wound up being the Amiga, it was actually promoted as a cheaper full
color Macintosh (hence the Jackintosh).
The Atari ST is no match for the Amiga, but the ST is still a very nice
system. I'm rather fond of them myself.
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Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
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