Atari 520ST

The 520ST was the first available ST. The system was basically developed in about six months as a competitor against the Commodore Amiga. At that time, Atari had difficulties including the operating system in a rom chip set. Therefore, you had to load the TOS from disk on the first 520ST machines. TOS (The Operating System) is based on CP/M 68K and includes a version of GEM. In a contract made with Digital Research, Atari declared that the will develope their version of GEM independently from DR's pc version. The last version of TOS, MultiTOS, has very obvious unix roots and can even be configured to act a bit like Unix.

Populous, a popular ST strategy game.

The 520ST is still capable to run 90 percent of all Atari software (the missing 10 percent are STE, TT or Falcon specific programs). The TOS can be upgraded to version 2.06 or MultiTOS.

An old 520ST can be updated to the following configuration:

• Motorola 68030 CPU/50 MHz
• 12 MByte RAM
• TV and VGA connection
• TOS 2.06
• True-colour graphic cards
• Atari Coldfire Project( English)
  
• Matthias Jaap's Atari programs( English)
  
• Dead Hacker Society( English)
  
• ST-Computer-Archiv( German)
  
• Atari Historical Society( English)
  
• Uni-Erlangen
  
• Uni-Michigan USA
  
• Newsgroup: comp.sys.atari.st