ST Book, the Notebook Atari ST

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.

No but you can jiggle the mouse now and the mouse pointer becomes huge which is kinda a similar thing

Wiggle the mouse/cursor quickly and it'll enlarge the pointer. Makes it easier to locate it.

I wish Commodore had had a quarter of Apple's marketing skills. More powerful, cheaper hardware with a significantly more capable and extensible OS could have made the Mac a footnote if executed properly and would have supplied some interesting competitive pressure to the wider market.

Not sure. While the ST was an awesome home computer when released in the mid eighties, there was little, if anything truly innovative about it. It's rather true to its marketing slogan "power without the prize". W/o competition between Atari and Commodore, prizes would surely be higher, but then, what would be left?

I think about that as well although I like to imagine that both Atari and Commodore survived as did BeOS, RadioShack/Tandy, OS/2, and all the machines I've only heard about but never used (esp. the European machines).

Although I suspect that even if all that stuff survived well into the internet era, the rise of web-based UIs would have lost everything interesting about each platform and rounded every corner to deliver the boring, ugly cross-platform software that is so popular today.

I think only Evernote did a good job of cross-platform where they wrote a platform specific UI layer onto a common foundation that did all the work and communicated with the servers. Even that didn't last because eventually they also bought into Electron which is basically the gray goo of software.

It's a bummer.

I'd assume it would have been pretty similar but we'd be running on Motorola CPU's (or a descendant of them)

The platforms would have needed to be opened up to clone builders to reach critial mass.

Amiga was a lot like DOS/Classic Mac OS, single user, unprotected memory...we would have seen it added on to like Windows 3.x/9x, until a re-written version with the right stuff took over (like Windows NT/2000/XP did).

Someone like Linus would have still likely written a UNIX clone and open-sourced it.

The minicomputers and UNIX servers/workstations would have still hung around for a while. The real trick is the Amiga CPU and the rest of the hardware would need to keep getting improved, catch up in speed, reach 64 bits, SMP...

It would have been a very different place.

In the IBM compatible world, the clones drove down the price then drove forward progress. It is doubtful that much of a clone market would develop in the Amiga/Atari world since the parent companies were already competing against IBM compatibles on price. Without clones to break free (as happened in the IBM compatible world), there wouldn't be clones to drive forward progress. I'm not even sure cloning the Amiga would be practical. Apparently Commodore had enough trouble "cloning" the Amiga (i.e. developing higher performance, yet compatible machines). Without the clones driving progress, companies like SGI and Sun would likely still be in the picture.

If Amiga/Atari domination somehow did happen, I suspect the CPU situation would be flipped around, with Motorola having both the incentive and finances to continue on with a fully compatible 680x0 line of processors and Intel chasing after its own equivalent of an 680x0-to-PPC transition.

As for the retrocomputing thing: DOS/Windows 3.x nostalgia is very much a thing in today's world. In that alternate reality, they would likely be higher profile (as Amiga/Atari are today).

If nothing else, it would have been nice to see Digital Research and Gary Kildall get the last laugh via Atari computers taking off.

I think if Atari and Amiga won the world would have a lot more focus on the media side of things, the playful, graphical, musical expression would be more evident. I don't think we'd have spent as long in the beige-box era, and maybe we'd still have little colorful imacs running something Haiku-esque, with enlightenment on top and some breakcore tracker music on bootup.

This is my fantasy, you're welcome to enjoy it while you're here and remember, no shoes on the couch.

> Would there be some weird "Amiga Server Enterprise Edition"?

I suspect Commodore's SVR4 port would have played a role: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix

Likewise, Atari had a Unix port on the TT workstation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TT030

Atari HATED to share anything with people outside the company. The couldn't even help developers build software for their machines, let alone let someone copy & commoditize their hardware. The Apple II was incredibly open and extensible, and successful. Macs where not and never more than a minor player until computers shifted to a mobile, general consumer product and Apple out executed and leveraged their single ecosystem.

> If Atari and Amiga had won instead, what would the world look like?

If the PC didn't establish itself, Commodore might have opted to release the 900 as a Unix workstation. With any luck, they'd port Coherent to the new Amiga and it'd be a Unix machine from day 1.

From watching Youtube, Ataris may have been the best computer to be exposed to in one's teenage years for so many reasons. It was very capable and efficient for it's CPU. Still might be to learn to build with constraints.

No, but I did use mine back in the day to write a ton of C code that made me lots and lots of money, recovering databases and such ..

Still got it, it still works, and Turbo C still boots up just as quick.

I recently bought an Atari Portfolio that was in working order. But it stopped working pretty quickly and now only shows random characters on the screen. Too bad, because I was really looking forward to that easy money.

John, is it you ?

Automated teller machine machine?

Never! It ran MS-DOS!

Yes, the mini-MIDI port on a 1991 laptop is truly unique.

But probably there wouldn't have been much of a market for that. Computer-driven live music performance was still very exotic. Laptop jockeys were a decade away.

The Atari ST wouldn't have been so onerous to bring on tour. Even the display wouldn't be the biggest/heaviest piece of gear a band would bring with them.

Here we see Atari Teenage Riot using their namesake live (even in 2010): https://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/5076088906

>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.

I don't think so.

Biggest non-modern tell for me -- the keyboard is at the bottom of the case and there's no wrist rest. That shift was about as drastic as the hw keyboard -> blank glass of the iphone transition: Pre powerbook, keyboards were at the bottom of the system. There were weird side mount trackballs, or trackpoints. Post powerbook 100/140/170 -- trackball in the bottom center, keyboard above that.

Trackpads came later, but didn't really affect the overall layout.

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.

Apple used to use full mechanical keyboards on their laptops -- the Powerbook 1xx era (with the exception of the 100) had wonderful keyboards. Good feel, good travel. Over time they flattened down, buy the ibook/tibook era they were super flat. Still mechanical, and popping the tabs at the top opened it up for memory/disk access. The downside there was that they were flexy, and not great to type on.

The island keyboards came in when they put the keyboard base inside the aluminum case and screwed it in with 60 of the smallest screws you've ever seen. Pain in the ass when you needed to replace one, but _way_ more solid and better typing experience.

The fact that the Atari ST's standard display was monochrome helped a lot, as they could use a cheap (and power efficient) laptop display and still maintain compatibility with most applications. That wouldn't have worked for the Amiga of course...

The Amiga A600 has nothing to do with a laptop project. It was a pet project on engineer who tried to make a cheap Amiga 500 with a analog gen-lock (it was called Amiga 300), it was supposed to be 50$ cheaper. But it didn't end up cheaper and for some reason management canceled Amiga 500 and Amiga 500+ and sold as Amiga 600. Management canceled Amiga500 that was still selling well and instead selling Amiga 600 that didn't sell well.

Amiga management is baffling at times.

Oh, man. An Amiga laptop would have been so cool to have back in the day.