[NTLK] (OT) on the mention of Atari...

[G Y]

Atari! Yes. I too threw my lot with Atari during the original personal computer wars.

I wanted an Apple II series but could not afford one (as my parents saw no value in a home computer which was really unheard of back in the late 1970's). Saved my money and bought an Atari 400 (with that fab flat membrane keyboard!) and a cassette player with States and Capitals.

Played RPG games once I bought a 64K memory upgrade and a Rana floppy disk drive and I was all set. Temple of Apshai, Ultima II, Ultima III <- my all time favorite!

When the Atari ST came out I already had seen the Macintosh but the price was too much for me again. The Atari 1040ST had a GUI so I thought GUI is GUI. After using the GEM GUI on the Atari ST platform I realized that not all GUIs are equal. As I am a techie that loves the newest and best tech, I decided that I needed to go on a quest to find the BEST GUI!

Windows 1 & 2; GEM (from Digital Research); Amiga 1; Macintosh 512K were all contenders. I looked at the essence of all of those GUIs. 

After I discovered that the Macintosh GUI had a soul it all clicked with me. A unified user experience where all of the applications had the same look and feel, all applications used the same elements and could not go off into their own user interface, subsystems were available for all applications to use (desk accessories, similar save/open dialog boxes, printing was unified with an OS level printing system, etc. This was the pinnacle of my quest. The gold idol I was seeking for.

So I did what a few of us Atari ST owners did, bought MagicSac Macintosh emulator with the 64K ROMS and the disc translator box and I had a Mac 512K with 768K of RAM. It worked well. I could run native Mac apps on those Mac formatted diskettes without conversion. The process was slow but that extra 256K of RAM could be made into a RAM disc so at lest the OS was in memory 100% after the initial load. So in I popped a disc or Mac Write, popped in a disc of Wizardry for Macintosh, or any GCR formatted disc with apps on it. I then had the ability to transfer the apps (if they were not copy protected) to a Magic formatted (MFM) disc which worked with the MagicSac emulator without the slow translator box (translated from GCR to MFM and back. This worked through the MIDI ports and was pretty cool. 

I soon did purchase a Macintosh Plus (at a reduced price of $1299) and came full circle. But for a while Atari was my hardware of choice. I still have them and they work as all of my other older computer in my 50+ computer collection.

* Also posted at my blog at The Mac 512.

Sincerely,
G.
The Mac 512 - the premier and original Macintosh Collector web site since 1998
http://www.mac512.com