Binary Dinosaurs Computer Museum
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Atari Mega ST4
One of Atari's successes can be regarded as the MegaST series. Building on the success of the ST machines (520, 1040) they produced a more professional box with 4mb of RAM, TOS 1.2 and something else not many competitors had at the time - a laser printer. This was because everybody else's laser printer had the printers brains actually IN the printer; Atari kept costs down by bolting the printer onto the DMA connection for external disks like the Megafile series of hard drives - an interface box produced the required signals to make the printer work and some nifty coding on Atari's part made sure the machine wasn't crippled when it was printing since essentially the CPU of the MegaST did all the work.
This machine sold like hot cakes, particularly since Atari had solved the common users complaint of spongy keyboards on ST series machines - they used membrane type keyboards whereas the MegaST used proper keyswitches. Software houses like Gribnif (who are still going) produced alternative desktops to the ubiquitous GEM desktop (NEOdesk in this example), and the result was something like the machine seen in the pix below :)
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All images and text © Adrian Graham 1999-2024 unless otherwise noted using words. Also on