Atari Falcon 030 Tower

[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!!!

[Mac-Falcon]

Okay, my first post and then such a flamable thread

At first to my person: I am an Atarian for nearly 25 years, but I owned an A500 and an A2000, too. I like both - the Amigas and the Ataris. The Amiga mainly because of it´s games and the Atari for beeing the better choice for me!

But one cannot say that one system is better than the other. Not for the 1st generation of both (260/520/1040ST, A1000,A500,A2000) nor fo the last (Falcon030, TT030, A1200, A4000).

Sure the Amiga has had the better gfx custom hardware for games, but hey, back these days I had to write documents and the Atari´s 640*400 at 75 Hz looked much better and felt better for the eyes than everything my A2000 could do that way. I really hated the work bench it was damn slow and had ugly colors... Atari´s GEM looked much better than that (in monochrome mode). Sure the Amiga had multitasking out of the box, but it was slow and also strictly limited to expandable but expensive RAM! The Atari also could do a little multitasking, but only with so called "acc"s which you could run at boot and work parallel to all opened programs... You could use nearly every program as acc, by simply renaming it from .prg to .acc... But also very limited because of RAM. The Amiga CPU ran at 7,09 MHz, the Atari had 8 MHz... that was a little bit faster Then as I also live in Europe (Germany) as Harrison, I have to say that it´s not true that noone used the laser printers... Everyone I knew who had an Atari had one. And the printing results were amazing at least if you see how fast it was!

The first STs did fail as gaming machines- hardwarewise, that´s true, but softwarewise as one told it´s not so easy to say...

In 1990 with STE, MegaSTE and TT the Atari had as nice gaming machines hardwarewise, but they lack of software proofs... but there are some perls out there (Sleep Walker, Obsession, etc.).

When the falcon hit the market, Atari didn´t have the money to produce enough units for the customers... I know at least 3 people who wanted a falcon back these days, but never got the chance to buy one and so bought a mac in 1996, when those got cubase audio...

Sure the falcon´s main goal was music. In 1993 no other home computer system could do audio harddisk recording with 8 tracks at once in a better than cd quality (44,9 kHz) out of the box!

And show me an Amiga from that time which can playback stereo mp3s without any additional hardware... I don´t think there´s one (maybe I am wrong at that point..., I am really not sure).

And if you take the computers and accelerators (beside ppc ones) at which speed do they run max? 66 MHz? My CT60 falcon runs stable at 100 MHz, people run them at 110 MHz and that´s really amazing!

The Amiga scene has the better clones today, but which success do they have? Not the one they deserve!

I dream that one day our scenes will unite and maybe we will get a very powerful new computer system, but everything else is just a waste of time and money

I mean you have the nostalgic freaks who like playing around with very old computers and you have people who do not want to use microsoft products (like me) and still use their old computers for every days work... and I really do that. But I won´t buy a clone of a dead platform for so much money I could by the latest gamer pc and use linux on it.

It´s very difficult these days... If nothing happens both scenes will die...

Have fun with your machines as long as possible!

[Harrison]

Hi Mac-Falcon. Great to see another ST fan joining to add his views. As I've said before, we might be an Amiga orientated site, but we love all retro hardware and software in its own special way.

Some interesting points raised and thoughts spared.

I love the old one about the ST's main CPU being just that little bit faster than the Amiga's. That was always used as an argument between fans of each machine. And as I already mentioned previously in the thread, the ST had to process everything using that single 8Mhz CPU. The Amiga on the other hand could farm many tasks out to its custom chipset to process, leaving it to process main program data. It didn't need to handle graphics, sound etc... the custom chips did it all instead. And the hardware architecture of the Amiga is what did make it better than the quickly cobbled together, off the shelf ST.

Then as I also live in Europe (Germany) as Harrison, I have to say that it´s not true that noone used the laser printers...

I could imagine that in Germany that was true, because Germans have in the past embraced the best specification hardware. However in the UK we hardly ever saw a laser printer in the 80's. Too expensive for most home users to afford.

I dream that one day our scenes will unite and maybe we will get a very powerful new computer system, but everything else is just a waste of time and money

I think in the last couple of years the different retro platform scenes have become much less hostile towards each other. In the past you would never have seen C64 and Amiga demo sceners sharing events with PC sceners, but now this is commonplace, and they all enjoy seeing what each can achieve on their hardware of choice.

I do however sadly think the days have gone when we will see a new powerful computer system developed and produced for us to enjoy. The PC is too well entrenched now and if we are honest, the PC is quite a modular platform, allowing us to select each component we want it to have, and have a range of OSs in addition to Windows to choose from to run on it if we wish. The Apple Mac is still hanging on, and doing OK in the niche market area they have. However I have the sense the Apple are moving forever away from the home computer market, and more dedicated to home entertainment. I think if they continues it might reach a point where they have to decide if the Mac as a platform is worth continuing, or if their online entertainment and iPod range is more important. As most know, I'm not a fan of Apple or the Mac, but it would be a sad day if the platform did end as competition is healthy. We need it for hardware, software and OS development to continue and evolve. If only a single platform and OS existed it would stagnate as there would be nothing for developers to compete against to try and keep ahead of the opposition.