Atari ST

Atari 1040STFM

I received my first Atari ST in 1989; a surplus unit from my father’s business. It was a luxury (at the time!) 1 MB model — the Atari 1040STFM, complete with the Professional software pack.

Hooked up to a colour television, I was instantly captivated by the lime-green GEM desktop. I had never used a computer mouse before, and it felt like a huge leap forward from the command-line and keyboard-driven worlds of the ZX Spectrum and the school BBC Micro.

After eagerly clicking through every bundled disk, I was — only very slightly — disappointed to find relatively few games included.

Fortunately, a friend owned the more gaming-oriented Atari ST Power Pack, and before long I was borrowing disks and discovering just how strong the ST’s arcade conversions could be:

Afterburner
Black Lamp
Bomb Jack
Bombuzal
Double Dragon
Eliminator
Gauntlet II
Nebulus
OutRun
Overlander
Pac-Mania
Predator
R-Type
Space Harrier
Star Goose
Star Ray
Starglider
Super Hang-On
Super Huey
Xenon

I continued using the ST well into the 1990s, maintaining a subscription to the venerable ST Format magazine — watching it slowly shrink as the platform’s commercial influence waned.

Eventually (like almost everyone else), I moved on to the PC. But those formative years with the Atari ST never really left me.

The Atari ST in Context

The Atari ST line was introduced in 1985 as Atari Corporation’s 16-bit successor to its hugely successful 8-bit home computers. The first model, the 520ST, appeared in limited quantities in mid-1985, with wider availability later that year.

The ST was groundbreaking in several key ways. It was the first mass-market personal computer to ship with a bitmapped colour graphical user interface, using Digital Research’s GEM desktop environment running on top of TOS (The Operating System), which itself was derived from CP/M concepts.

Powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 8 MHz, the ST offered a clean, flat 24-bit address space and performance that compared very favourably with contemporaries — including early IBM PC compatibles and even Apple’s Macintosh, at a significantly lower price.

The Atari 1040STFM

Released in 1986, the Atari 1040ST was a landmark machine. With 1 MB of RAM as standard, it became the first home computer to break the US$1-per-kilobyte memory barrier, an extraordinary achievement at the time.

The STFM variant added:

An internal floppy drive
RF and composite video output for use with televisions
Stereo sound output via RCA jacks

This made it especially popular in home environments, where dedicated monitors were still considered a luxury.

Technical Overview

Component	Details
CPU	Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz
RAM	512 KB–1 MB (1040STFM standard)
Graphics	Low: 320×200 (16 colours) / Medium: 640×200 (4 colours) / High: 640×400 (monochrome)
Sound	Yamaha YM2149 PSG (3-channel)
Storage	3.5″ floppy disk drive (720 KB)
Operating System	Atari TOS with GEM desktop
Ports	MIDI In/Out, joystick/mouse, ACSI (hard drive), serial, parallel
Notable Feature	Built-in MIDI ports

The inclusion of built-in MIDI ports was particularly significant. It helped establish the Atari ST as a dominant platform in music production throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s — a role it retained long after its gaming prominence faded.

Games, Productivity, and Identity

Although often perceived as a games machine — particularly in Europe — the ST occupied a fascinating middle ground. It was equally at home running arcade conversions, desktop publishing software, programming tools, and professional music applications.

Its crisp high-resolution monochrome mode made it well-suited to word processing and coding, while its colour modes powered some of the era’s most impressive home computer games.

For many users, myself included, the ST was a first serious computer — one that encouraged exploration well beyond games.

Looking Back

The Atari ST represents a unique moment in computing history: when graphical interfaces were becoming mainstream, hardware was still approachable, and experimentation felt encouraged rather than abstracted away.

For me, it remains one of the most important machines I ever owned — not just for what it could do, but for what it inspired.

James Mackenzie