Production
Copyright 1998
It all happened quite
unexpectedly way back in late 1991. I was sitting by my fireside
enjoying yet another offering from the BBC, there came a tapping at my
door which turned out to be my neighbour Jackie who was looking for a
place to hide a christmas present she had just received in the post
for her sons. It was a family curriculum pack containing an STE 1040
and a selection of software. I was given permission to open it and
have a muck about just to see that it was working alright. My
experience with computers at that time was limited to a short
familiarisation module during a recent Hotel Management course at
college where we were of course using PC's Apples and Apricots. So I
had never seem anything quite like the STE!! During those few weeks
leading to christmas '92 I became quite familiar with the operation of
the Atari and wondered if I might be able to get one of my own.
Christmas came and I said goodbye to the Atari and then it was all
forgotten. Until, a few months later, a work colleague who was moving
house asked me if I would be interested in purchasing his Atari STFM
and a printer (Star LC10). Yes I said, I would.
Eventually, after a few weeks of using this on a small B&W television
he came back to me offering an RGB monitor as well and that was the
turning point. When I finally saw the quality that was possible on
this humble machine I began to take an interest.
I wanted to do everything at once, send FAX's, perhaps get on the
Internet? Well FAXing was no problem but the internet?? No way, not
in 1993 anyway!!. The STFM was a little less capable than the STE had
been but I soon got used to it's short fall.
Next came the purchase of a Hard Drive from Dave at the Upgrade Shop,
now I had 235Mb of storage space and the world was my oyster, how had
I managed without it I wondered, programs loaded in the blink of an
eye and I had unlimited storage capacity, no problems with large
programs and bitmapped fonts now. But I could do with some more
memory.
So a 1 Mb upgrade was fitted and now we were flying. At this point I
was still just using the Atari for word processing and doing my
banking at home. I eventually purchased a copy of Timeworks 2 and
found out all about desktop publishing!! This was fantastic and
indeed Timeworks is still a very capable program although version 2
does not support vector fonts, but then, I didn't know what they were
so I was delighted.
Around about this time, 1994'ish, I had my STFM upgraded to TOS 2.06
as my original operating system was a little outdated and clunky, I
also invested in my first Modem, a Supra 144LC, and began my online
life with Ad-Lib BBS. This was a total eye opener and, again, I
wondered how I had gotton along without being on line. Help was
readily available and software easy to find and download and all at
14,400 Bpm. So, for a while, I forgot all about my speed problem and
settled down to enjoy bulletin boards.
I went along like this for a while, still reasonably happy. I
eventually invested in the full 4 Mb upgrade for the Marpet board and,
due to my finding employment with the Ambulance Service, I purchased a
Deskjet 320 Portable printer. This made an enormous difference to
print quality and speed over the LC10. Still, I would like to see my
graphics in colour.
At some point in all of this someone started talking about Atari
Internet software!! Hmmm, thought I, interesting. But I didn't jump
on the bandwagon until 1996. At that point I joined up with Zetnet
and met David Henderson through my online struggles with setting up.
I then proceeded to conduct a very successful on line existence using a
4Mb STFM my trusty Supra Modem and loads of help from David and the
Zetnet Atarians mail list which was born around that time.
I still wanted some colour in my life though so I began to scan the
newsgroups for a Falcon, and, found one!! Only 4 Mb and with no
internal Hard Drive but, a Falcon. So I purchased it and burst onto
the Internet in full colour? No, actually it was alittle more
complicated than that, the Falcon OS was total crap and it refused to
web browse in colour without locking up the hard drive. Never mind,
at least I could manage 16 colours now!!
Things began to change rapidly now on the Atari scene. ST Format
magazine had died and it had begun to look as if the Atari was at last
going to be laid to rest. There were still users around, we knew
that, but we needed a magazine as a focal point and just to give the
Atari a sense of reality. Things were looking grim for a while until
a rumour broke on the Internet that a new magazine was on the way.
And it was! Atari Computing was born and lives to this day keeping
the small but active UK Atari scene alive and kicking.
Eventually I invested, once more, in a memory upgrade, this time to 14
Mb and, while I was at it, I fitted the wonderful Nemesis accelerator
board to bring my relative CPU speed to about 50Mhz. Apart from that
it also sorted out many of the bugs with the Falcon hardware and
allows me to, at last, web browse in 256 colours or even true colour
although I prefer to stick with 256.
My modem suffered a sudden end from a lightning strike and had to be
replaced last year. Since then it's replacement, which was never as
good as the Supra, has turned it's toes up three times and is
currently away for replacement once again. I treated myself to a USR
Courier this year as I became fed up with the modem being away for
weeks at a time getting repaired. The Courier turned out to be worth
every penny of it's substantial price tag giving faultless
performance, good connection rates (31200 to 33600) and amazing
stability, it does not even get fazed by the call waiting beeps!! so
definately to be recommended. As things moved on the Internet was hit by the next big advancement which was 56K access. The Courier already had a standard called X2 but Zetnet did not support this. USRobotics came to the rescue with a V90 upgrade (V90 being the standard which became accepted) and soon we were surfing at 48000bp!!
So now we are up to date. The original hard drive from the Upgrade
Shop is still humming away happily after all this time and has been
supplemented by an EZflyer 230 Mb for backups and extra storage, well
eventually you fill any hard drive, but you show me any PC that could
operate, as I could to this day, with only 235 Mb of Hard Drive
space!! or 14 Mb of ram for that matter.
The Atari remains a flexible and powerful little home computer and
keeps me, and others like me, Microsoft free. It is interesting to
note that on new years day 01/01/00 all Atari's will remain
operational with few, if any, problems from the so called Millenium
Bug. Should really be called the Microsoft Bug * * As it happened no one suffered from this bug and it turned out to be another scare story
My final setup then is
So thats it, my system history, as accurately as I can remember.
In the middle of 2002 I was finally forced by the growing up of children and the increasing complexity of the Web, to invest in a Windoze box. The Falcon still graces my desk but gets less and less use thee days as it is such a hassle swapping cables from monitor, printer and modem, that laziness dictates I spend most of my time in Windows. I have however continued my avoidance of all things Microsoft and immediately dumped Internet Explorer and Outlook Express from my program compliment. I am not getting rid of the Atari just yet though. The time will no doubt arrive when I will be glad of a backup system. My early experiences with Atari Computers taught me a lot and I find that navigating my way around computers is now very intuitive due to the extremely hands on nature of setting up the Atari's on the net. I am constantly called upon to help my friends and family with minor computing problems and rarely fail to suss it out!
At this point I began to
wonder about speed, as I was now working with large documents and of
course, images, within Timeworks. Sometimes I was able to go and make
a coffee while waiting for images to load and display!! More memory
might help, someone said, so I fitted a Marpet upgrade, which meant I
had to remove the original 1 Mb upgrade and fit the, quite complex,
Marpet board populated with 2 Mb. Still slow!! A few programs worked
a little faster, and to be fair, Timeworks was one of them since it
used data slaving and was able to load more of the overlays into RAM
at each session, however it was still a bit slow with images.
And
now,