ST Falcon Goes high on eBay

"Hills, Paul" <Paul.HILLS(a)landisgyr.com> says: Not all the Falcons were shipped with MultiTos (which was the OS you mean, it was a derivitive of MiNT). There were three differen't OS's shipped. Likewise, all the OS's (including MultiTos) were extensions to the TOS already in the rom (4.04) which was single tasking, and essentially the same as the previous TOS's. The Falcon has the privilege of being the only Atari computer without it's intended OS in ROM because of the shipping worries. There were other problems such as the 68030 only being 16 Mhz, and the fact they used a 16 bit data bus. The system ram also used proprietary ram cards (expensive). The Atari version of GEM itself had not evolved much since they first licensed the code from DR, and they basicly just improved it with improving the presentation a bit (colored icons and better windowing effects). The built in hard disk controller was an IDE controller. What caused the Falcon to not do well was the fact that the product was to little to late. Besides adversely affecting the marketing, Atari Corp. was not known for it's marketing prowess in the first place. In the Falcon, Atari Corp. was giving people what they had been screaming for since the first 520/1040ST series. That includes the multi-tasking, which people had been complaining about for years that Amiga had and Atari should have as well. Had the Falcon (or something compareable) been released back around '87 when it should have (or some how been available as some kind of upgrade back then), the market for Atari might have looked very different by the early 90's. As it is in that period you had the 520ST, 1040STF, 520STF, 520 and 1040 STFM, 520 and 1040 STE's, Mega ST, Mega ST 2, Mega ST 4, Megas STE, TT, and TT/X (leaving out the STACY laptop and all the pc compatibles) all released prior to the Falcon in that 6-7 year period. Much of that sending a message to consumers of "buy a whole new computer to upgrade". Likewise, Atari had a genuine desire to invest little in actual advertising, assuming that low prices and word of mouth from the press would be enough. By the time the early 90's rolled around, Atari and Amiga (in the US) had been downgraded to "alternative computers" in the market and survived by moving towards niche markets (Atari relying more heavily on the "musician market" it had been a part of because of the built in midi ports, and Amiga moving towards the Video Toaster/video effects production market for major support here). By the time the Falcon came out, about the only places you could come by Atari's here was directly from Atari Corp. or in music stores (and most of what I saw there were STE's or older). The Falcon was canned in a little under a year, and Atari Corp. exited the computer industry and focused on it's upcoming Jaguar console. Again, I understand that the Atari computer market in Europe was different where Atari and Amiga enjoyed much larger and longer shares of the market. (Which can also easily be seen by the ammount of TT's, ST's, and Falcons constantly up for auction on the European Ebay sites). Marty