The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals. Due to its graphical user interface, it was known as the "Jackintosh”, a reference to Jack Tramiel.

The Atari ST was part of the 16/32 bit generation of home computers, based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, with 512 KB of RAM or more, and 3½" double-sided double-density floppy disks as storage (nominally 720 KB). It was similar to other contemporary machines which used the Motorola 68000, the Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga. Preceding the Amiga's commercial release by almost two months, the Atari ST was the first computer to come with a fully bit-mapped colour GUI, using a version of Digital Research's GEM released that February.

n late 1989, Atari released the 520STE and 1040STE (also written STE), enhanced version of the ST with improvements to the multimedia hardware and operating system. It featured an increased colour palette of 4096 colours from the ST's 512 (though the maximum displayable palette of these without programming tricks was still limited to 16 in the lowest 320x200 resolution — and even fewer in higher resolutions), Genlock support, and a graphics co-processor chip called Blitter, which could quickly move large blocks of data (most particularly, graphics sprites) around in RAM. It also included a new 2-channels digital sound chip that could play 8-bit stereo samples in hardware at up to 50 kHz. Two enhanced joystick ports (EJP) were added (two normal joysticks could be plugged into each port with an adaptor), with the new connectors placed in more easily-accessed locations on the side of the case. The enhanced joystick ports were re-used in Atari's Jaguar console, and are compatible. RAM was now much more simply upgradable via SIMMs. Despite all of this, it still ran at 8 MHz.

Our model has additional memory, an 80386 board and a SCSI 50MB disk drive.

Manufacturer: Atari
Date: 1986

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH15463. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.