THE 16-BIT COMPUTERS would be dominated by one man and one
CPU. The CPU was the Motorola 68000, known in the business as
the 68K—a multimedia powerhouse whose potential had not yet
been tapped. The man was head of Commodore, Jack Tramiel.
Tramiel was an aggressive man with even more aggressive
business ideals—Commodore was sick of Jack, and Jack was
sick of Commodore. Atari was old, bloated, and bleeding money,
and parent company Warner wanted rid of it. Key Atari engineersTHE 16-BIT ERA:
BRING THE MULTIMEDIA
A golden era of choice, rapid development, and modern capabilities
ATARI ST
SPECIFICATION
CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 8MHz
RAM: 512K (up to 4MB)
GRAPHICS: 320x200 with 16 out of 512 colors, 640x200 with
4 out of 512 colors, 640x400 monochrome
SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F three-voice squarewave plus
one-voice white noise
OS: GEM, via Atari TOS
STORAGE: 3.5-inch floppy, optional HDD
RELEASED: June 1985
LAUNCH PRICE: $800 (base model)
PRODUCTION: 1985–1993
WORLDWIDE SALES: 2.2 millionRegarded by many as the first
proper 16-bit computer, the
ST was a powerhouse bargain for
its time. Jack Tramiel wanted to make
something that would walk over the Mac and IBM PC
for a much lower price. Arriving a month before the Amiga,
prices were around $500 cheaper than the upcoming
Commodore Amiga 1000 equivalents.
For an operating system, Atari rejected Microsoft’s
unfinished version of Windows in favor of Digital Research’s
GEM (Graphical Environment Manager). GEM was only
available for x86 processors at the time, but after porting
it to Motorola’s 68K, and combining it with the underlying
DOS system, the results were dubbed TOS—“The Operating
System.” This was a genuinely pleasant environment, very
similar to the Macintosh, and often dubbed the “Jackintosh”
after the Atari boss.
TOS was a hit with consumers. The Atari had a high-res
monochrome mode that was very popular with businesses,
particularly when you could get an Atari with a printer and
hard drive for less than the cost of an IBM printer alone.
Furthermore, it could read MS-DOS floppies, and even
emulate Mac software (and run it faster than a Mac).
The cheap sound chip was awful, but Atari made up for
it by including MIDI ports—a stroke of genius. Plugged into
external MIDI equipment, the ST truly shines, with better
latency than a lot of pro equipment.COMMODORE AMIGA (500)
SPECIFICATION
CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 7.16MHz
RAM: 512K (up to 8.5MB)
GRAPHICS: 4,096 colors at 320x256, 16 colors 640x512
SOUND: Custom MOS Paula chip, 28KHz
OS: AmigaOS 1.2
STORAGE: 3.5-inch floppy, optional hard disk
RELEASED: July 1985
LAUNCH PRICE: $1,300
PRODUCTION: 1985–1996
WORLDWIDE SALES: 4.85 millionAt first glance, it appears the
ST had the Amiga licked for
price and power, but look
more closely, and the picture
becomes very different. Both these machines use the
68K CPU, but the Amiga had a large color palette and a
proper multitasking GUI.
More importantly, the Amiga was designed around
multiple co-processors for handling audio, video,
and memory access, thereby freeing up the CPU and
outperforming the competition. Unlike the ST, the Amiga
had a great sound chip, with advanced features that
wouldn’t be available on the PC for years.
While Atari had found an instant market with music
composers, the Amiga had its own niche: video editing. With
the right hardware, Amigas could “genlock” with video
signals, matching their refresh rates, and enabling video
overlays and easy effects. For a few grand, someone could
get into professional video editing for less than a tenth of
the cost of existing systems.
Modification was very popular, and it was common to fit
Amigas with expansion boards with a second CPU, enabling
Mac or PC functionality. It didn’t take long for the Amiga
to branch off into different, more advanced models, but it
was the budget Amiga 500 that was the real hit. Released in
1987, the 500 was almost half the price of the original. Costs
were cut by repackaging the bulky desktop case into micro
form, new chipsets enabled simplified design, and lower
RAM prices allowed for 512K of RAM.wanted to make a new machine based on the 68K, but Atari wasn’t
interested, so they left to create their own company, Amiga.
Tramiel also left Commodore to go his own way, and bought
Atari’s consumer division.
Tramiel now had an established brand under which to sell
new products, bringing his own team of engineers with him from
Commodore to work on the new 16-bit machine: the Atari ST.
This left Commodore without engineers for its next-generationso retro
30 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com