1991

C64 harddisk

A harddisk for the C64 - after severall attempts with old Commodore drives, CMD developed a stable harddisk especially for the C64. They used a quite advanced technology at that time by incorporating a SCSI drive. Unfortunately, the drive was quite pricey but that did not prevent CMD from releasing other hardware extensions: a ED disk drive (2,88 MB 3,5") and a turbo card with 16 MB ram extension.

ST Book

While the STacy was a modest success (especially among musicians), it was by no means a light notebook. Technicians at Atari tried to make the system lighter, the display brighter and enhance battery life. The result was the ST Book which was quite light even by today's standards (about 2 kilo). The system used special memory chips to improve battery life. While the Book was anticipated by many, it took Atari a while to ship the first units. It is estimated that there are only 1000 working ST Books all of which were shipped in Europe.

ST Pad

Like the ST Book, the ST Pad was shown at the CeBIT fair in Hannover. Unlike almost any other computer, the Pad had no keyboard. Instead it consisted mainly of a LC display which supported the ST High resolution (640x400 monochrome). Inside it used similar energy saving circuits like the Book. The system was controlled by a pen, the system would translate the handwriting using vectorization methods into standard text. The translation routines were built into the special version of TOS. Because hard disk drives would use too much power, the ST Pad used memory cards.

The ST Pad was later renamed to STylus but was never sold. It was just one of many projects using a keyboard-less computer, for example Momenta presented a similar system. The concept would later be revived in shape of the Palm PDA and Tablet PCs.