A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away…

By Peter Latimer

“If this is what it’s like on the Spectrum, imagine what it must be like on the Atari ST!”

It was about October 1988 and I was at my friend’s house playing games on his Spectrum +2. We were ten years old, playing a game called Bionic Commando, an arcade conversion that looked and sounded great on the Spectrum. We were getting too old for kids' toys, but not yet old enough to care much about girls, clothes or being trendy. And since mobile phones were still the size of France and probably cost about twice as much, it was home computers that counted. They counted because, unlike today, there was still a real choice. The main contenders were the Spectrum, Amstrad and Commodore - you were accepted if you had any of the main three. People with MSXs, BBCs or something else were seen as pretty weird, unless that something else was an Atari ST. But none of the kids had an ST, it was an unobtainable object of desire. Until that Christmas. Yes, I was actually going to get my own Atari ST! I thought my friend’s Spectrum +2 was pretty good with a built-in tape deck and a whole 128 KB of memory, which was double what some of its big rivals had but compared to what I would soon have? My ST would have four times as much memory, 64 times as many colours, 16-bit versus 8-bit, disk drive versus tape deck. You didn’t need to walk the dog while a game loaded, and when it did load it was like nothing you’d ever seen before.

I first noticed the Atari ST when I saw an advert in C&VG (Computer and Video Games) magazine for the game Road Runner, based on the cartoon. They had the usual screen-shots along the bottom: Spectrum? Almost monochrome, pretty poor. Amstrad? Better, but not much. Commodore? Pretty impressive compared to those two, but didn’t even compare to the final screen-shot, the ST. Unbelievable. It looked just like the cartoon. The Road Runner looked like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote looked like Wile E. Coyote. Was that possible? Could computers really do that kind of thing? This one could, and I was about to own one. Around Christmas 1988 the "Super Pack" was the deal of the season. For your £399 you got the best computer imaginable which seemed a pretty good deal in itself, but you also got 21 games with it. 21 proper games, not 21 text adventure games typed in from a magazine (remember when magazines published games in BASIC for you to type in? They were almost always awful, but you’d typed them yourself, you were part of the creative process, and that meant you'd play them no matter how awful they were). My dad wanted to get me a Spectrum +2, after all, it was available for £149 and as far as he was concerned, a computer was a computer. However, I knew better and eventually convinced him that the ST would be the best option. Not because of its superiority as a computer but because he thought it might stop me talking about it 24 hours a day.

As Christmas came closer I became more and more excited. I’d saved up to buy a copy of ST/Amiga Format (yes, saved up - it was £2.95 and I got £2.50 per week. It had been £2.50 but they claimed a worldwide shortage of the in-huge-demand 3.5 inch disk had caught up with them). Inside was a whole new world, warnings about things called computer viruses which the magazine assured its readers could not be transmitted by rubbing disks together, a review of the ground-breaking Carrier Command which they claimed had graphics that matched anything seen on the Acorn Archimedes, and a Mandelbrot set plotter on the cover disk (I seem to remember ST Format, as it became, had about 6,000 Mandelbrot programs on the disk each and every month of its existence). ST/Amiga Format was created to appeal to the sensible 16-bit owners who realised the ST and Amiga were both excellent computers with their own particular strengths. Unfortunately, there were no such people and soon the magazine split in two and ST owners could get a whole 800 KB of cover disk space all to themselves each month.

By the time December arrived the excitement was unbearable. I was ten, I loved computers, I loved Christmas, and these two loves of my life were about to come together. I even made a list of the order I was going to play the 21 games. Test Drive would be first because I’d seen a review and had my suspicions the screen-shots of the cars were really photos rather than computer graphics. Return to Genesis and Quadralien were to be saved for Boxing Day so as not to use up all the excitement in one day. I also made a list of the games I was going to go out and buy after I’d got through the bundled 21. Outrun topped the list as I’d played it that summer in the arcade and assumed the all-powerful ST version would be at least as good, probably better. I was sadly mistaken.

It seemed like eternity, but finally it came - Christmas morning. I got up about 04:00 and was sent back to bed. I got up again about 4:10 and was sent back to bed. About 06:00 my parents finally relented and I went to find my new computer but they’d made the terrible strain of the excitement even worse by hiding it and leaving clues for me. Didn’t they understand what I was going through? That I’d probably die of a heart attack before I found it? But thankfully I didn’t, and eventually found it in the living room behind the sofa. For Christmas Day and Christmas Day only, my dad reluctantly allowed me to plug it into the big colour TV downstairs instead of my own portable black and white set. And so, after months of tense waiting, the time had arrived to switch on. I’d already read up on how to load games on an ST, you didn’t have to type LOAD or press any weird combination of keys, just put your disk in and switch on. It was that easy! So in went Test Drive and, hand shaking with excitement, I reached for the power button…

But I didn’t get that far though since, right then, it occurred to me I hadn’t plugged in the joystick. After seeing the joystick Atari generously included (the same tiny, horrible, hand-destroying thing you could find bundled with an Atari 2600) I ran up to get my own joystick, and then it hit me, where did you plug the darn thing in? There seemed to be no joystick port anywhere. I knew there had to be one somewhere as a lot of the games said "Joystick required". I could have looked at the instructions but even then I realised how defeatist that is. After exhausting all the obvious places I looked in the less obvious places before finally looking in the stupid places where nobody would ever put a joystick port, and that’s where I found it. Even with small ten year old hands it still seemed to take a lifetime to manoeuvre the connector into the port which was set at an angle into the underside of the computer. To this day I wonder who in Atari decided it would be a good idea to make preparing for two player games (swapping the mouse for a second joystick) a task which would require two days of preparation, world class dexterity and the knowledge that each time you risked bending the pins in the sockets into all kinds of shapes.

With that final piece of the puzzle completed I was able to go ahead and switch on. After a brief 15 minute delay while my dad tried to get the TV tuned into the computer it was time to take a Ferrari for a Test Drive - it was time for a new beginning.

No more waiting for tapes. No more envying friends with their 128 KB machines. No more being restricted to the 8-bit section. No more limits. Now I had a computer which let me do it all. At first it was just games, especially as, unlike previous computers I’d owned, if you switched your Atari on without a disk there was no BASIC. Whoever heard of a computer without BASIC? But it wasn’t long before I discovered there was so much more. I managed to save up for a copy of STOS and was soon writing my own games and programs of all kinds which did things far beyond the commercial games I’d owned for my 8-bit computer. I was given a copy of Neochrome and was soon drawing colourful (yet awful) pictures. A copy of ST Writer and I learned how to word-process (who needs WYSIWYG?).

The following years saw me databasing, making music with MIDI, sound sampling, video editing and anything else you can think of, all using that same 520 STFM. My friends were amazed at first, but they all ended up with Amigas, then PCs while I stayed true to my Atari. They didn’t understand, but I knew exactly why. It was the perfect compromise computer, the perfect computer for people who wanted to be able to do anything but couldn’t afford ten different computers. You wanted to play games, your Atari was up to the challenge. You wanted to do DTP, your Atari was right there. You wanted to make music, your Atari was the tool to use. Unlike the PC, you didn’t need a degree in computers just to load a game and unlike the Mac, you didn’t feel your computer was treating you like an idiot. The hardware was good but it was the versatility and innovation of the people who used that hardware which produced the dedicated band of followers for the Atari who still exist today. The ST was techie enough to attract plenty of talented people who could make it do unbelievable things, but not so techie as to put off non-technical users. And so the ST ended up with plenty of non-technical users demanding the full range of world-class technical and leisure applications and they got them all, usually developed by people motivated more by computing itself than money.

The ST range reached popularity in the twilight years of home computing’s golden age but ultimately fell when computing companies were forced to become marketing machines first and innovators second. Atari-based computers will continue to be supported by the enthusiasts but it seems the ingredient which made them a mainstream success now belongs in the past. The concept of a cheap out-of-the-box computer that can do it all is gone. There is no longer room in the mainstream for the little computer "that could" and the world of computing a much duller, more predictable and unimpressive place because of it.

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MyAtari magazine - Feature #9, April 2002