So it's been a lot of comments on some of the other videos
I've done about the computers that
Exist in the background of some of the shots and what they are and why I've got them. Well, they are
Various models [of] the Atari, St
Family of Machines which after I'd finished with the zx spectrum in the BBC microwave from about
1990 onwards I grew up playing around with and they were a really [nice] machine to learn to program on
To do things with but also to do general computing things and even play the odd game
So what we have here is the initial setup. That was originally created in
1985 the Machine was [developed] over a period of about a year from about the middle of 1984 after Jack tramel had bought
Atari having left Commodore which he previously started he taken with him, Shiraz ship G from
Commodore who's the creator of the Commodore 64 and they set to work?
producing A
16-bit machine a sort of Perhaps [the] success you might think the commodore 64
Although the way, it works internally was quite different
obviously if you look at the interface on screen you can see that it was also influenced by
The Apple Macintosh it had windows icons mice and pointers, so the machine itself is this box here
It's got the six eighty thousand processor. Which is the same one as in the Mac [plus] over there
it's got the keyboard [Built-in] and on these connections for the mouse on the side and also a
Joystick and you could take them [out] and put a second joystick in if you wanted came for the monitor
This is an Atari monitor although
It's quite common these machines certainly the second revision could be plugged into a television as well
Which is how most people probably use them and at this point. They had an external floppy drive
What would you use if you didn't have that footage olive oil hell?
No, no, so the machine couldn't work without a floppy drive. So you had to buy the machine and the floppy drive
Was a separate extra until probably about 1987 when they produced machines that looked a bit like
This which came in what was referred to is the ft air for the sd. Fm although?
This is a slightly later revision the ste from about 1990 where they upgraded the graphics and sound?
This machine had a floppy drive built into the case as well
But they also made the mouse
Joysticks ports access protected
by placing them
Underneath so you had to pick the machine up every time you wanted to replace them bit of bad design there
I reckon so what I'm going to do is I'm going to swap this machine over for that one so you actually start machine up
Run some software and just see what it was [like]
so we've switched over to the more modern machine with the floppy drive built in as I said, this is the
Enhanced version the Ste they did some extras with the graphics
But in general it's for all intensive purposes similar to the original machine one thing that's obviously when you look at it
Is it was inspired by the Macintosh the interface is what's called gem. It's developed by digital
research you've got your windows icons [mics] and
pointers so [that] a
Floppy and proper Aim with some software in this case Mars 6 eight thousand assembler
And we can open up the floppy and we get just like on the Macintosh one immediate difference
Is that whereas the macintosh was black and white?
The Atari, St
Had two color modes had a low resolution color mode with 16 colors and a slightly higher
Resolution mode with four colors one of the things that director mel was trying to do you coined the term power without the price in
Order to give people a machine with the same sort of power as the macintosh in fact it was actually
slightly faster than the original Macintosh with more memory but at a much lower price and in fact
I think it's safe to say this was the first computer on sale with a megabyte of memory for less than
[$1000] when [they] brought out the one meg version
But it's useful for various things one of the things that people often use this for was for playing games
you've got a variety of games hard disks weren't that common on machines particularly home machines and so you had things on floppy disks and
You would have lots of properties
So you get little boxes like these to keep them in the trouble
I found with these things is that these things were quite flimsy and you drop them and they would shatter into lots of pieces
So the operators [Aamir] was called toss stood for the operating system although there was some
Suggestions it might have been the trommel operating system, and it was cobbled together from Code Written by Digital research for [Jam]
[Jam] the interface was also available for the PC as [well] although it didn't take
Because a small company in Seattle came up with something that they called [windows]
It was single tasking could run one program at a time
so when you finished
Assembling something you would stop that and change something else perhaps to do some graphics or something and then you go back to the assembler
and you end up swapping [disks] like crazy to do that until you eventually gave in and saved up enough money and bought a
Hard disk so the operating system was single tasking people did eventually write multitasking ones as a chap in
Canada called Eric Smith who created something called mint. Which stood for mint is not toss
Until he got hired by Atari, and they started using it which chemically cane mint is now toss
And that was extended into something called multitasks which came out in the early 90s
But there's also one produced by a german called Andreas chrome key called Magic. Which is what I tended to [use] back in the 90s
As I said one of the things people used to use this a lot for was playing games. It's a popular home computer and
By the end of the by the mid-90s the games have become quite sophisticated
This one. I'm starting here called substation is a sort of doom clone and the graphics aren't quite as
Textured as fantastic as you'd go on the PC at the time, but it's still a playable game and still quite impressive
For what is an 8 Megahertz processor?
With when this case it's got 4 meg [what] the game would run with just one megabyte [as] we've been talking the floppy just has
Been going as it's loading the gaming it's much slower
And you saw how long it took the games now loaded and we can start
playing and as I said it's a sort of doom like game and
We can sort of explore this world
the same thing and
There's no texture mapping but we've got the same sort of exploring thing and the monster just [round] here
Yeah, I'm being attacked by Monster I
I'm terrible at these sort of games, so when you finish making you first let's play
Yeah, because I can hear sounds and everything as well. Yeah, so there's a to the mulleted volume up there are sounds and things
one of the things I really liked about this machine is a programmer in [the]
80s I'm completely dead now. Is that these machines were complex enough that you could use them as we use machines now
I had word [processors] test up publishers and so on and use them for all sort of things up until while
I was at University I was using these things I could log onto the internet [and] connection browse the web and things
But they were still simple enough that one person could understand not just the software and how to write programs, but actually how the hardware
would work
Now the sound chip inside it here. It's not bad you can do some really quite cool stuff with it
But it wasn't perhaps as the same with something like the sid chip in the commodore 64 or the sound chips in the amiga
but what made the difference with the AtAri was what was on the side on
The side of the Atari unlike pretty much all other machines at the time were two midi ports musical instrument digital interface
So the Midi ports is a standard developed in the synthesizer market for musical instrument [digital] interface for interconnecting
musical instruments both with each other
But also with other devices like computers and what this meant was [that] musicians people like fat boy slim
soul2soul seal as well as people writing [schools] for film and television could use this machine and
Edit their music recorded digitally
Not the sound but the actual notes they were playing
into the computer and edit it on the computer, and then play it back and the software that was developed on here things like
Logic Cubase is still exist today and people are still using them on things like the apple Mac and occasionally a PC
You could get add-ons for other machines that provided Midi, but one nice thing about the way it was implemented on the AtAri
basically they duplicated the way the keyboard worked the
Keyboard [that] [you] type Tom as opposed to a musical keyboard which meant that the timing of the interrupts and things that controlled the Midi
Ports was very very tight and so much more reliable for handling music
But I think the story goes is that one of the designers?
Liked playing music or something or some of them he knew liked playing so they just added them on because they could do it very
very easily
It's almost as an afterthought and yet it became the thing the machine was perhaps
Most useful you often saw them on top of [the] pops or other things if you look on the extras on the Moulin rouge
DVD even probably six or seven years after the machines popular [at] the heyday
Fatboy Slim's still there using it in the background to create the music for a major motion picture
You only have this small?
Section that you can actually draw into that was until the programmers came along
So they hacked it not so much that they pushed it beyond. What the designers initially faced
And for people who hated computers [this] was wonderful
It clearly loves me