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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.

All things Atari are old of course, but this class of machine is rarer still so little information exists online aside from references to its mere existance. I've been debating whipping up a little wiki about rare Atari machines so threw something quickly together here, though I think I'll move the content over to the Atari-Forums for other Atari-nerds to find easier.

A few external photos I took of the machine are here; I will open her up (natch!) to get photos of the motherboard, drive and such in a bit -- the machine has issues so hopefully its just loose cables and a bad drive, but we'll see. I suspect the RAM is surface-mount so hopefully I needn't get in there with precision solder gear.. eep!

Still, found out a few things about the history of my specific ST Book so thought I'd spew it out here. Quoting from 'js2k' (name changed):

I do have some history on your ST Book. It belonged to Hans Martin-Krober. Hans was in charge of the UNIX System V which was never released and in charge of the midi Music system for the Jaguar. He's also a very cool guy. If you can get the data off that hard drive it contains some Atari HQ files including some Jaguar goodies. :)

That last bit makes me want to yank the drive (which seems dead or screwy now) and take it to a data-recovery shop.. but that is very pricey. I guess my best bet is to find another drive and try to get it going, and keep this one the shelf for attack someday in the distant future when money grows in my pockets directly.

Any hoo, I'm trying to avoid gushing about the prospects of becoming a dad in 6 months, but I'll likely explode all over the blog soon. We'll see.

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