Atari Falcon 030 Tower

[quackmore]

Well it's quite easy to keep this civil since I've received such a warm welcome and inviting atmosphere!

I think I've had an advantage since I've owned both systems and can give a completely non-biased opinion. Also, I've had first hand exposure in professional environments with both.

For example, at game companies I've been to and worked at, A2000's were used to make video games for the Lynx & SNES.

TT030 to makes games on the Jaguar (I still have my Jaguar dev kit).

TT030 using DynaCad for mechanical engineering (at a company here in San Diego).

I've used multiple music studios which used ST's & Falcons (there was nothing like Cubase audio in the early 1990's).

I actually got my A4000 from work. It was used to make the glue screens and intros for Disney DVD's.

and the list goes on...

So you see, I don't come at this from merely from a user stand point, but from somebody who has seen first-hand what these computers actually have done professionally.


These questions are based on around 1992 or so...

Q: How can you replace an A500 with a ST when you need more on-screen colors?!
A: Buy a VERY expensive and perhaps even custom video card?!
- I don't think so....

Q: How can you replace a ST with an A500 when you HAVE to do repeatedly fast printing professionally?
A: Buy a VERY expensive laser printer with 4 megs of RAM OR a custom interface for the Amiga?!
- Same again, I don't think so...

Q: How can you replace an A2000 w/a video toaster with a ST when you're doing video production?
A: You can buy a genlock and fudge it? LOL!!!
- Please don't even try...

Q: How can you replace a Falcon running Cubase Audio to lay down audio tracks professionally with an Amiga?
A: You can buy a MIDI adaptor for the Amiga and resort to reel to reel recording, then pain-stakingly edit your tracks using the old 1960's method.
- Are you kidding?!?!?!

I rest my case!!! (unless someone keeps it going, PLEASE don't keep this going LOL)

[Harrison]

Some very good points listed in your Q/A summary and I have to agree when you look at both systems being used in the professional market place. For professional graphics and video the Amiga couldn't be beaten, and for affordable printing and music studios the ST was the best option. And I wouldn't argue with that.

The only thing I would add is that the ST was quite a budget option for the printing and DTP markets. The Apple Mac was the system that ruled both of these areas at the time and you hardly ever saw an ST or Amiga in them. Only in lower budget studios would you have possibly utilsed an ST for DTP because the Mac was so expensive.

However if you leave the dedicated professional marketplace, where the computer would be utlised for one specific task, and look at the home marketplace then things are quite different. In the home maketplace, unless you were a musician wishing to use MIDI then the Amiga's much more advanced architecture meant it was the better option for games, graphics, sound sampling, and pretty much everything else.

[quackmore]

Eventually the Mac ruled these areas, but not until about 1996 or so. Everyone I knew of used the Atari Falcon or dedicated embedded systems for laying down audio tracks.

Without Cubase Audio (or something like it), the Mac was worthless for laying down audio tracks. And this wasn't a software support issue, the Mac lacked the hardware to handle the job.

Back in the old days, the Mac was just an empty box (just like the PC). With co-processors for sound and a 2nd CPU (slave) especially made for digital signal processing (perfect for audio), I was able to do everything I needed on my Falcon. The Mac just simply wasn't up to the task.

As for DTP, by the mid 90's just about any computer could handle the job, handle it fast, and handle it right.

Thanks for the great conversation everyone. I'll be back from time to time especially when I resurrect my Amiga and try to get it onto the internet to grab some of those great games!

[Harrison]

Sorry, but some of those final statements just made me laugh because they are so inaccurate.

Eventually the Mac ruled these areas, but not until about 1996 or so.

How wrong is that statement!!! The Apple Mac was launched in 1984, with Aldus PageMaker in 1985. And the same year the Apple LaserWriter was launched, pushing Apple to the forefront of DTP. Then in 1987 QuarkXpress was launched, and the same year Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freeland. From this point on all newspapers and magazines used them. And to this day Adobe Illustrator is still at the forefront of illustation, and Quark only lost out to Adobe when Indesign was launched.

The ST in contrast was nowhere in this marketplace. It was a budget alternative for a few years at the end of the 80's, and definitely not anywhere near to the same level as the Mac. The Mac completely dominated the DTP market until the mid 90's when the PC started to take over.

Back in the old days, the Mac was just an empty box (just like the PC).

It's called expandable, not empty! I personally see expansion slots as very useful. Not a nagative aspect. Being able to built a system using the expansion cards you need for a task, rather than a fixed design like the ST with some hardware you might not ever use!

With co-processors for sound and a 2nd CPU (slave) especially made for digital signal processing (perfect for audio), I was able to do everything I needed on my Falcon. The Mac just simply wasn't up to the task.

Well... the Mac was with some extra hardware added! And in the UK the Falcon was a non starter. Not seen in many stores and no one owned or used them. It was also a huge commercial desaster for Atari. Released in 1992 and canceled in 1993. And it's 68030 CPU was only clocked at 16MHz and although ti could address 32-bit memory, it was restricted to 16-bit memory to save money! Madness!. In the UK the Falcon was a novelty by the time is was launched, and by this point the ST and Atari were at deaths door, with Atari cancelling the ST completely in 1993. And by the time the Jaguar was released... Atari had sadly become a bit second rate, and the Jaguar was seen as a joke before it was even released. And the less said about the toilet seat add-on the better. If only they hadn't rejected Jay's design ideas for his 16-bit system Atari's history would be so different.

But please don't get me wrong. I followed the development of the ST family. I had really wanted a TT when they came out but they were over priced, and the Amiga was better. And I did follow the Falcon closely, and based on the development spec I really was interested in getting one. However the final finished system was way below Atari's original design ideas and fell short by a long way. The DSP was an interesting inclusion and obviously very useful for the Audio market. However it was also possible to utilise it for so much more. But sue to the Falcon being such a disaster we never got to see it really used for much more.

I do have fond memories of the ST as a home computer. While not as powerful as the Amiga, and while containing a much more inferior OS, the ST was still capable of delivering some useful productivity software (I used to do word processing (1st Word Plus), spreadsheets, databases, graphics (neochrome), and it was powerful enough for games developers to create good versions of most games. But it was just not on the same level as the Amiga.

Atari did try to fix this with the STE, with this updating version giving the same number of colours in the system palette as the Amiga, adding a DMA sound chip that produced Stereo 8-bit audio, a hardware blitter, and support for more memory. All things the AMiga could already do in 1985! It was however far too late as games and software developers already had a large STFM market to support so had to write their software to run on the older hardware. So the much better STE hardware was never really utilised. A bit of a shame.

[quackmore]

I'm glad I made you laugh, at least you find me entertaining

I hope I don't ruin the humor... but I completely disagree.

The Mac was not a failure in sales or prestige, but it failed miserably in the late 80's as far as being ahead of the competition in capability.

"How wrong is that statement!!! The Apple Mac was launched in 1984, with Aldus PageMaker in 1985. And the same year the Apple LaserWriter was launched, pushing Apple to the forefront of DTP. Then in 1987 QuarkXpress was launched, and the same year Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freeland. From this point on all newspapers and magazines used them. And to this day Adobe Illustrator is still at the forefront of illustation, and Quark only lost out to Adobe when Indesign was launched."

This did not put it ahead since other computers could run it's software!

DTP Explaination
I knew some small businesses who used the Mac and some that used the MegaST. The ones who used the MegaST also had a Specre GCR cartridge which ran EVERYTHING. Adobe Illustrator was one thing everyone was talking about that they could run on their ST only at a higher resolution, slightly faster clock speed and larger screen for the ST. Sorry, software in an empty box doesn't get you anyplace.

Music Explaination
Who would want to run the Mac software when there was WAY more ST MIDI stuff available, and a lot for free!

Show me a Mac that could lay down and edit/manipulate Audio track and samples in realtime prior to the mid-1990's.

"It's called expandable, not empty!"

Expandability is a feature, not a great hardware design. An empty AT/ATX case is very expandable but I wouldn't go bragging about it.

A good example of having great hardware AND expansion slots is the A2000. It's best to have some integrated hardware vital to the system WITH expansion available if needed. Would you take out the Amiga co-processors and hardware which makes it Amiga and leave only the 68k and slots of an A2000?! Well that's essentially what the old Mac's were.

Take for example even PC motherboards today, you see that a LOT has been integrated into the motherboards now instead of having separate cards for everything.

Best example: Compare the Apple II with the Atari 800. You'll see what I mean...

The Falcon was a non-starter. Atari failed with it like they did with a lot of things. However, many musicians made use of the audio features not available in the Mac. This was its main purpose with people I knew.

Actually, I just thought about it... and I think I come at these debates all wrong. I don't come at them with a "theoretical analysis" of what has happened, I come at them from the point of view of, "What have I actually seen or done".

Since I worked for "The Federated Group" as a teenager, we had Mac's, PC's and Atari's and worked with all three in the late 80's. Trying to use those tiny Mac screens or clumsy PC's to do layouts for out ads and store signs and specials on those slow printers was frustrating. In comparison, we could run the same Mac software if we had to on larger screened, faster computers. We ran Mac software FASTER than our Mac's did!

Then as a Music major in college, I could have bought a Mac for music. The Mac and ST software were one in the same to me since I could run Mac software, but the Mac was WAY more expensive and when the Falcon was released, it lacked the hardware to lay down audio tracks.

At video game/video production companies in the early years, the Amigas were just too far ahead of other computers to even have a choice of using anything else.

This brings us up to the mid-90's. Macintosh finally got a version of Cubase Audio in 1996 I think it was. But by this time, I was out of school. PC's were doing much better as well.

To sum up:
I come from actually "seeing" these computers in action to produce things. And not just 1 ST either, but multiple Macs, Amiga's, PC's etc. I've used them all and found some computers come with the right hardware and some don't. There may have been award winning software written for the Mac, but that didn't make it ruler of the DTP world.

[Harrison]

Actually, I just thought about it... and I think I come at these debates all wrong. I don't come at them with a "theoretical analysis" of what has happened, I come at them from the point of view of, "What have I actually seen or done".

That was actually a point I was going to make. I tend to discuss anything like this using my knowledge of the actual history of each computer system and how it sold, the software it had, and the reception and markets it was popular in.

But I do think that many people do approach such a discussion exactly as you have been. We each view the success of a system, along with how good it is/was, based on our own experiences using a computer system. And a particular computer system will either be seen as good or bad depending on each users personal needs and requirements.

So for you, you personally witnessed the ST being used far more than the Mac for DTP and music production. Whereas I didn't see this in the UK design studios I was linked to (and also through the people I knew working in them) at the time.

And you will always find fans for every computer system ever made. Because they owned and used them, and got something useful or fun from them, they retain some good memories, and therefore become a long standing fan.

[quackmore]

Well put!!!