Atari ST

• 1. Introduction

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  The Atari ST arrived in stores in July 1985, and within months Atari was reporting that more than 50,000 units had sold. That speed was the story. The machine went from concept to store shelf in a little under one year, designed by a small team led by Shiraz Shivji in just five months. Its slogan was blunt: "Power Without the Price." The questions worth asking are how a company in financial turmoil managed to pull that off, why professional musicians across Europe quietly adopted it as their studio workhorse, and what made Garry Kasparov register the very first copy of a chess database program built with its collaboration.

• 2. The Rivalry That Built It

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  Jay Miner, one of the original designers of the chips inside the Atari 2600, tried to persuade Atari management to fund a new chipset for a computer and console. When they refused, he left in 1982 to form a small think tank called Hi-Toro, which was soon renamed Amiga. Amiga ran out of capital and turned to Atari, then owned by Warner Communications, which paid to keep the project alive. In return, Atari received exclusive rights to the so-called Lorraine chipset for one year, with the option to add a keyboard and sell it as a full computer, to be called the 1850XLD.

  That arrangement collapsed when Jack Tramiel entered the picture. After leaving Commodore International in January 1984, Tramiel formed Tramel Technology, Ltd. with his sons and former Commodore colleagues. By July 1984 he had bought Atari's consumer division from Warner, re-hiring roughly 100 of the 900 former employees. Tramel Technology soon renamed itself Atari Corporation.

  Amiga, now desperate for capital, opened talks with Tramiel's old employer, Commodore. Tramiel sued Amiga Corp. on the 13th of August 1984, seeking an injunction to block the deal. The lawsuit left the Amiga team in limbo through the middle of 1984, giving Atari's engineers the runway they needed. Commodore eventually announced the Amiga 1000 in July 1985, but it was not available in quantity until 1986. The two companies settled the dispute out of court in March 1987, in a closed decision. That brief window of Amiga's delay let the Atari 520ST reach shelves first.

• 3. Building It in Five Months

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  Shiraz Shivji, the lead architect, had previously worked on the Commodore 64. His team investigated several processor options, including the 32-bit National Semiconductor NS32000, but engineers found its performance disappointing. They moved to the Motorola 68000, a chip whose 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals gave the ST its official name: "Sixteen/Thirty-two."

  For the operating system, Microsoft proposed porting Windows, but the delivery date was two years out. Atari's management was also uncertain the company had the expertise to write an OS from scratch. The solution came from Digital Research, which was developing a GUI environment called Crystal, soon to be named GEM. A team from Atari flew to Digital Research headquarters to help port GEM to the 68000. Leonard Tramiel oversaw this effort, internally called "Project Jason" after designer and developer Jason Loveman.

  GEM ran on top of GEMDOS, a disk operating system that gave the ST a fast, hierarchical file system and function calls that programmers familiar with MS-DOS would recognize. The combined package became Atari TOS, which stood for "The Operating System" but was nicknamed the "Tramiel Operating System." For sound, a custom chip called AMY had been in development internally, but it needed more time, so engineers substituted a commodity Yamaha YM2149F, a variant of the General Instrument AY-3-8910. The completed design was shown at the January 1985 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

• 4. Skeptics and Believers

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  InfoWorld's assessment of the prototypes at early computer fairs was pointed: the machines were described as "much slicker than the hand-built models shown at earlier computer fairs," and notably not a "typical Commodore 64-style, corner-cutting, low-cost Jack Tramiel product of the past." Still, others were not convinced. Retailers remembered Tramiel from his Commodore years with little warmth. One said, "If you can believe Lucy when she holds the football for Charlie Brown, you can believe Jack Tramiel." Another said their interest in Atari was "zero, zilch." Neither Atari nor Commodore could persuade major chains like ComputerLand or BusinessLand to carry their products.

  Software developers were just as cautious. Large publishers including Lotus, Ashton-Tate, and Microsoft declined to commit to either the ST or the Amiga. Philippe Kahn of Borland advised consumers to stick with companies like Apple and IBM. Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts was blunter still, saying, "I don't think Atari understands the software business."

  The surprise came at Las Vegas COMDEX in November 1985, where more than 30 companies exhibited ST software while the Amiga had almost none. The New York Times reported that more than 100 software titles would be available, most from small houses that, as the paper noted, "desperately need work." Spinnaker praised Atari's improved attitude toward developers. Lifetree said it was giving Atari "high priority." The turnaround was not complete, but it was real.

• 5. MIDI, Musicians, and the Studio

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  Built-in MIDI ports set the ST apart from nearly every competitor. The standard 520ST included two MIDI ports in 5-pin DIN format, with both an IN and an OUT, and the machine's fast, low-latency response made it a natural fit for music sequencing.

  The professional adoption was wide and deep. Tangerine Dream relied on the Atari ST heavily in their studio and for live performances through the late 1980s and 1990s. Mike Oldfield's album Earth Moving was recorded using an Atari ST with C-Lab MIDI software. The Pet Shop Boys replaced their Fairlight CMI with an ST; their programmer Pete Gleadall said it "was just much easier to work with." Depeche Mode used an Atari ST running Cubase during production of Songs of Faith and Devotion in 1992, and the machine is visible in the documentary included with the 2006 remaster of that album.

  Darude created his 2000 hit "Sandstorm" using Cubase on an Atari 1040ST. White Town's "Your Woman," which reached number one in the UK singles charts, was made on an Atari ST. Dario G used the ST to produce "Sunchyme," which reached number two in the UK charts. Skinny Puppy used the ST with Steinberg Pro 24 software to produce several albums, including Rabies and The Process. At Jean-Michel Jarre's Paris La Defense concert for Waiting for Cousteau, musicians had Atari ST machines running C-Lab Unitor software attached directly to their keyboards.

  The forerunners of Cubase and Logic Pro both originated as Atari ST applications; Logic Pro reached the platform in earlier forms as Creator, Notator, Notator-SL, and Notator Logic. Cabaret Voltaire founder Richard H. Kirk stated in 2016 that he still writes music on an Atari 1040ST with C-Lab.

• 6. Gaming and the Software Scene

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  Dungeon Master, a real-time pseudo-3D role-playing game, was developed and released first on the ST and is regarded as the best-selling software ever produced for the platform. MIDI Maze, released in 1987, used the ST's MIDI ports to connect up to 16 machines for networked deathmatch play. Stunt Car Racer delivered fast 3D graphics that surpassed competing systems largely because of the ST's CPU.

  It became standard practice in the industry to develop games on the ST first and then port them to other platforms. Early titles like Goldrunner showcased sampled sound and smooth scrolling; Starglider featured a multi-second title sample and fast 3D wireframe graphics. The ST's monochrome mode, running at 640x400 pixels on monitors like the SM124, supported its own distinct category of games, including the puzzle game Oxyd and the artillery game Ballerburg.

  Piracy, however, created a persistent drag on software support. In 1989, Gilman Louie, head of Spectrum HoloByte, published a letter in gaming magazines explaining that within 30 days of releasing the non-copy-protected ST version of the flight simulation game Falcon, it had appeared on bulletin board systems complete with maps and code wheels. He reported that the Amiga version sold twice as much in six weeks as the ST version did in nine weeks, and that Mac and PC versions outsold the ST version by four to one. Computer Gaming World called his letter the clearest explanation seen to date of why software companies produced less software for the ST.

  The Atari Falcon, released in 1992 as the ST line's final evolution, found a dedicated homebrew community. Garry Kasparov became the first chess player to register a copy of ChessBase, a program whose first version was built for the Atari ST with his collaboration in January 1987. In his autobiography Child of Change, Kasparov called that database facility "the most important development in chess research since printing."

• 7. Legacy and the Living Community

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  Atari discontinued the entire ST line in 1993, shifting the company's focus to the Jaguar video game console. The 1040ST, released in 1986 with 1 MB of RAM, had been the first home computer to break the cost threshold of less than one US dollar per kilobyte of RAM. Its successor, the Falcon030, ran a 68030 processor at 16 MHz with an onboard Motorola 56001 audio digital signal processor, supporting sampling frequencies above 44.1 kHz.

  After Atari left the market, Medusa Computer Systems and Milan Computer manufactured Falcon- and TT-compatible machines using 68040 and 68060 processors. The FireBee, a later clone, is based on the Coldfire processor. In 2007, a developer known as Jookie introduced the SatanDisk, an SD and MMC card adapter that connects to the ST's ACSI port and supports cards up to 4 GB, replacing the mechanical hard drives Atari originally sold. In 2009, Jookie released the UltraSatan, which supports two SD/MMC cards simultaneously and adds a battery-backed real-time clock.

  The ST Offline Tournament, an organized competitive gaming league for Atari ST games, was founded in 2007 by Thorsten Butschke, ChrisTos, and SSB. It ran until 2011, was restarted in 2023 due to player demand, and continues today with season rounds lasting one month each. Authors have provided support in tangible ways: Simon Phipps, who wrote Switchblade, hand-painted a unique winner's certificate for participants. The first game ever played in the tournament was Superfly.