ST Book, the Notebook Atari ST
19 comments
·October 24, 2024firecall
JayDustheadz
Wiggle the mouse/cursor quickly and it'll enlarge the pointer. Makes it easier to locate it.
majormajor
I don't think System 7 or OS 8 had a trails option either. I remember seeing that only as a "fun Windows thing" back then.
krige
Interesting to see that Atari did complete their notebook project. As far as I know (note: might be decades of internet tall tales), Commodore was also trying to get one rolling, but eventually gave up and released merely a small factor breadbox system, the A600, albeit shipped with ready support for internal hard drives, as well as the then barely standardized PCMCIA interface.
drooopy
Oh, man. An Amiga laptop would have been so cool to have back in the day.
ptek
Any one else remember going to the ATM machine with their Atari Portfolio to get some "Easy money" in the early 90s? ;D
DidYaWipe
Automated teller machine machine?
zabzonk
I suppose these might have been attractive to very well-heeled musicians because of the MIDI ports, which was one of the reasons that the full-sized ST was popular with them.
shiroiushi
Compared to the "island" keyboards that most laptop computers today use, the keyboard on this machine is a thing of beauty.
DidYaWipe
Yep. And take note, Apple: Atari managed to include both Backspace AND Delete keys! Of course, so does everyone else... except Apple to this day.
Moru
My ASUS has a POWER-button where my end-button used to be... I thought we stopped mixing in power-buttons on the keyboards ages ago for obvious reasons.
DidYaWipe
When Eject buttons became obsolete, the obvious thing for Apple to do was to finally put a Delete key there. But nope. For a while it was some weird "lock" thing, and now it is indeed a power button.
classichasclass
I've got a STacy. It's a tank, like the article says. On the other hand, it does have more typical ST expansion options.
transfire
Sometimes I like to imagine a world where Commodore and Atari saw the writing on the wall. Instead of competing each other to death, while the IBM PC open architecture took off, they collaborate to create a joint open architecture of their own.
How different might the IT world look today if we had had a deluge of Amiga/ST clones.
bitwize
That is a... beautiful laptop. It looks modern. With a beefier CPU, display, memory, and disk, something in that case could be released today and it'd sell.
Though it's edged out by the Amiga, the Atari ST was truly a thing of beauty in its day. My wife was pretty chuffed to hear that a model in the line has her name (of course, the STacy).
shiroiushi
>That is a... beautiful laptop. It looks modern.
No, it doesn't. It looks better in certain important ways:
1) the keyboard has real keys, not those stupid "island" keys that are all the rage now.
2) the screen has a taller aspect ratio, which is better for actual computing work, whereas laptops these days all have wide screens because of economies of scale with TVs and because people want to watch HD video full-screen instead of doing real work.
This looks more similar to machines from the golden age of laptops, which was probably between 2000 and 2010.
Moru
I just bought the largest laptop I could find for work to get the vertical space. Turns out they don't make bags for those anymore though so I have a gigantic backpack that I have to squeeze in somewhere :-)
>Active-matrix was the much better, much more costly alternative. The difference being that passive matrix could not handle motion well, so it was easy to lose track of the mouse cursor if it moved across the screen too rapidly.
For the kids today, this is why we used to have Mouse Trails in settings!
I just checked on my Mac, and we no longer seem to have that option.