17 Facts About Atari ST

Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family.

The initial model, the Atari ST 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July.

Atari ST was born from the rivalry between home computer makers Atari, Inc and Commodore International.

Atari ST, which was later renamed Amiga Corporation, pretended to sell video game controllers to deceive its competition while it developed a Lorraine-based computer.

In return, Atari ST received exclusive use of the Lorraine design for one year as a video game console.

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Digital Research was fully committed to the Intel platform, so a team from Atari ST was sent to the Digital Research headquarters to work with the "Monterey Team", which comprised a mixture of Atari ST and Digital Research engineers.

Atari's Leonard Tramiel was the Atari person overseeing "Project Jason" for the Atari ST series, named for designer and developer Jason Loveman.

Spinnaker said that "Atari ST has a vastly improved attitude toward software developers.

Some, such as Software Publishing Corporation, were unsure of whether to develop for the ST or the Amiga; and John C Dvorak wrote that the public saw both Commodore and Atari as selling "cheap disposable" game machines, in part because of their computers' sophisticated graphics.

Atari ST originally intended to include GEM's GDOS, which allows programs to send GEM VDI (Virtual Device Interface) commands to drivers loaded by GDOS.

Atari ST later upgraded the basic design in 1986 with the 1040ST.

In late 1989, Atari ST released the 520ST and 1040ST, enhanced version of the ST with improvements to the multimedia hardware and operating system.

In Europe, C-Lab licensed the Falcon design from Atari ST and released the C-Lab Falcon Mk I, identical to Atari ST's Falcon except for slight modifications to the audio circuitry.

Atari ST stated that he had been warned by competitors that releasing a game like Falcon on the ST would fail because BBSs would widely disseminate it.

Atari ST reported that the Amiga version sold in six weeks twice as much as the ST version in nine weeks, and that the Mac and PC versions had four times the sales.

Atari ST's initial development kit from Atari ST is a computer and manuals.

Atari ST Transputer Workstation is a standalone machine developed in conjunction with Perihelion Hardware, containing modified ST hardware and up to 17 transputers capable of massively parallel operations for tasks such as ray tracing.