The Atari 520ST Computer

Atari 520ST

The Tramiels were now leading the world to the first 16 bit computer. They had introduced the 130ST and the 520ST At the Winter CES show in 1985. These computers were to combat the Macintosh in power and in price and did quite well taking charge of the Computer races. It was a very cheap computer for being such a well built computer. The original 520ST was not able to get the finished version of GEM AND TOS into the 194kb ROM so a disk had to be also sold with it to load the GUI into RAM, this left only about 320kb of RAM left and made many Atari customers a little upset with Atari, this had been corrected within the year though and a new larger ROM chip had replaced the old one.


Atari 520ST Specs
First Year 1985
Last year of production 1985?
Processor CPU Motorola MC68000 (no more 6502!)
Processor Speed 8mhz (faster than most computers!)
Co-Processor 1 none that we know of!
RAM 512kb (upgradable to 4mb!)
ROM 32kb (no OS) so ROM was useless
Colours 320x200 16 colours
640x200 512 TOS/ 4(!) GEM
640x400 Monochrome (special monitor)
Sound 8  Octaves and 3 Voices
OS TOS + GEM on disk (should be ROM)
I/O ports RGB video output
Cartridge Slot (barely ever used)
MIDI in/out (a big thing with ATARI)
RS232c
2 joystick sockets 1 as mouse and joy
Centronics (email me with info about this)
Floppy Disk port, Modem port, HD port.
NOTE: did not come with a diskdrive!