Atari 1040ST
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The Atari ST was the successor the the Atari 8-bit line the same way that the Amiga was the successor to the Commodore 64. While incompatible with it's 8-bit baby brother, it was a far more powerful 16-bit system. the Atari ST was not quite as technically capable as the Amiga but it was still a major step forward and was particularly popular among musicians who wanted MIDI capability. It was also quite a bit cheaper than the Amiga.
The original Atari 520ST was released in 1985. A slightly upgraded 1040ST was released two years later. While mostly a minor upgrade, the 1040ST was notable for being the first computer to come with 1 MB of RAM for under $1000.
The Atari 1040ST includes the following features:
- CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz
- RAM: 1 MB
- Graphics: 640 x 400 mono, 640 x 200 with 4 colors, 320 x 200 with 16 colors
- Sound: Yamaha YM2149
- Disk Drive: 3.5" 720kb
The Atari ST line used Digital Research's GEM GUI which ran on top of Atari TOS which was basically an updated version of CP/M. This was also not as sophisticated as Amiga's multitasking OS but again, the Atari ST was much cheaper and still quite powerful for its time.
There were several more powerful successor systems to the 1040ST but it was really only the 520ST and 1040ST that gained any significant popularity in the U.S. The Atari 16-bit line of computers was far more popular in Europe where Atari made something like 75% of it sales.
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I wish I owned an Amiga or Atari computer. In the 90's everyone was so obsessed with getting better faster computers I likely could have gotten one for pretty cheap. We forget the capabilities of those systems because they can't do some things that we think are important. But then we also forget all they can do. I wouldn't be a programmer today were it not for those early systems that had BASIC built in. I got fascinated and obsessed with programming on a computer from the 80's. How different of a world would we be in if people weren't so obsessed with buying faster computers and instead kept buying systems that were more open and worked on upgrades and modifications more. I wish I had. Now I can only wish and realize my time is limited.
I had a Commodore 64 as my only computer from 1987 until 1993. Then I upgraded to a 486 based PC and the race was on. It was sometime later before I had an Amiga.
I had a TI 99/4a until sometime in the 90's when we got a Macintosh Performa 550, which was 68030 based with a floating point co-processor. It was quite capable for the day and was very helpful in my education...but now looking back on it, I wish I had something in between, possibly with access to BBS services. I didn't even know that BBSes existed until their time was over.
I started calling BBSes around the time I got my PC in 1993. For the next few years they were still very popular. However, that popularity declined quickly with the rise of the internet. By 1997 or so they were getting hard to find. There are a bunch around these days, accessible via telnet or ssh but what was nice about BBSes back in the day was that they were local with local callers.