In March of 1986 I bought my first Atari, an Atari ST. In September 1990 I upgraded it to a MEGA ST. This was basically the same system, but with separate system case, 60 Mb hard disk case, and a keyboard (the best I’ve ever typed on). With 4 Mb of RAM it was quite a beast for its day, which became even more beastly in August of 1991 when I got an extra 44 Mb hard disk. Over 100 Mb of hard disk space was almost impossible to fill at the time (these days, of course, there are a great many individual files on anyone’s drive that far exceed that size).

In October 1993, fairly early on, I got my hands on the new Falcon 030. This was a significant improvement on the ST series, with it having a 68030 main processor, a Motorola 56001 DSP, and support of a multi-tasking OS. It was fairly Atari ST-compatible, though you sometimes needed to jump through hoops to get it working. It had a whopping 340 Mb hard disk, insane by the standards of the day. I seem to recall I used NeoDesk on it, which was really quite awesome to work with.

When PCs started to get more and more prevalent I got a Pentium 60 Mhz device with Windows 95, 8 Mb of RAM and a 1 Gb hard disk. This was February 1996. I remember playing a lot of “Descent” on it, and using it to communicate (via the wonderful and still new – to me –  internet) for my teacher education. Inevitably, there was no longer enough space for both the Falcon and the PC on my desk, so 22 October 1996 (30 years ago today) saw me bidding farewell to my last Atari machine. This signalled the end of nearly 11 years of my Atari-centric activities.

The Falcon never really broke through, partly because of some technical limitations that never allowed it to really soar. The Atari company also chose to focus on their really quite excellent Jaguar game console, which unfortunately did not manage to compete with Sony’s Playstation and Sega’s Saturn. In 1996, the Atari brand was bought by hard drive manufacturer JTS. This was basically the end of the company that produced cool home computers.

This was my Falcon work space, early 1995. Note the inconveniently placed Panasonic KX-P1081 dot matrix printer at the bottom left 😉

The last picture of my Falcon, printer and monitor. Sadness.

My PC-centric workspace, late 1996. I had also moved to a different place.