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Tech: The Atari ST Book
Thu, 03 Aug 2006

Everyone knows I've got a mental problem when it comes to retro hardware or anything with Atari written on it; I've collected all sorts of ST hardware but I thought I'd take some pics of one of the rarer pieces I've got - the ST Book, of which only about 1000 were ever produced and likely most are damaged or lost. Really, right now I'm going through another round of 'trim the fat' to make room in the house, and after that.. perhaps a round of 'trim the meat' too (*cry*). But hey, need to reduce the amount of junk in the place, and make room for the <secret's out>baby on the way (teehee!)

The ST Book was one of the first notebook class computers -- smaller laptops. It followed the earlier Atari STacy which was a great machine, though a monster weighing in at about 15 pounds.. too heavy to carry , for sure. The ST Book trimmed down features to reduce power consumption and the physical specs, so it lacked a backlight on the display, a floppy drive, various ports you might like.. but it did slip in at around 3 or 4 pounds with a decent battery life and was essentially a full monochrome Atari ST the size of two VCR tapes side by side. With flash memory so it could shut down and start up nearly instantly. In 1990-91. Nice.

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Review: Atari Gothica DVD collection
Sat, 24 Jun 2006

I stumbled across this DVD-set on ebay and being the Atari-ST-wanker than I am it was only a matter of instants before my willpower broke. I've already acquired a prodigious collection of old ST junk and built up a respectible archive of BBS-related software in my little attempt at software preservation, but its been up to the pirates of yesteryear to have kept alive some of the great software from the platform. No one, but no one would have kept their copy of Word Perfect for the ST, so in a way the pirates (yar!) from 1986 have really achieved something. But these barrel-chested fellows didn't archive the free software, artwork and audio that made up such a large part of that precious 16-bit culture -- since it was freely available and distributed by BBS, Fidonet, and user groups already. No effort was made to especially preserve it, so only the pro-tools such as Notator MIDI-notation (still used by some few) or applications that have grown even today (Calamus graphic layout suite) and games live on. Emulation can provide a platform to fire up Gauntlet and Dungeon Master.. but <SallyStruthers>won't someone please think of the culture?</SallyStruthers> Without effort, no one but I will remember the DEGAS Elite version of Elric some anonymous artist rendered...

A few various Atari ST collections can be had online, mostly disk images of the games for feeding to various emulators. Atari Gothica is a collection that (from my quickly looking through it) is not made up of that -- instead it is SIX DVD's of Atari software, music files, picture files, textfiles and other jetsam from the era. This my friends, is Atari gold! Atari nerds among you will know you can head over to a few FTP sites that existed back in the day through to now, but how long will they remain?

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