[j45]

This is awesome! I wish I had kept my old ST disks haha.

Apps I remember:

Revenge of the Mutant Camels remains one of the best games ever.

Calamus was also a great piece of software that predated Pagemaker for many years.

Heroes quest, police quest series of games.

There was an animation/tweenijg app for animation that blew me away.

These machines were great substitutes for amigas of the day.

[chipotle_coyote]

While Calamus was indeed a great piece of software (IIRC, Linotype-Hell actually sold a very high-end printing system using an Atari ST and Calamus as the control system for a Linotype Imagesetter), it did not predate PageMaker. Aldus PageMaker came out in July 1985; Calamus DTP came out two years later, in July 1987.

Calamus -- at least as a brand -- outlived PageMaker, though! Invers Software, the owners of Calamus, shut their doors only last year, but the web site is still up; a macOS descendant of Calamus called "iCalamus" appears to still be in active development, under relatively new owners (who are longtime Macintosh developers).

https://calamus.net

https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/icalamus/

[Fins]

There was also for a while a native Windows NT version of Calamus (they even had Alpha et al versions, if I remember correctly) that was quite good; I used it to make money for quite a long time, and although by now I guess there must be something that approaches its functionality (haven't followed DTP world in years), at the time it had features that Quark or Adobe couldn't touch.

[chipotle_coyote]

I think the NT -- well, later Windows in general, I guess -- version is the one that kept going until 2018. I'd always heard good things about it, but was over on the Mac side of the world with PageMaker and later InDesign. (While I'm still over in Macworld, when I need to do DTP-ish things these days, they tend to be in LaTeX, so I never actually looked up iCalamus, although I feel like I should give it a test drive sometime.)

[Fins]

It well might have been. I was beta-testing it the North American publisher (and got it for free, although they made quite a bit off me on Calamus SL and plugins for Atari TT030 I had before), even for a while after they sold to... Roxio was it? I can't even recall by now, but development was done in Europe.

They did some really nice things with virtual objects, being able to zoom in down to a printer dot, stochastic rasterization and all that.

There were some other very high-end packages for Atari as well --Didot, Retouche Pro, TMS Cranach. For some reason European developers really went wild developing professional-level DTP software for Atari with some very impressive results. Too bad Tramiels didn't do much to support them...

[j45]

Appreciate the clarification about Pagemaker, reading your post reminded me about Aldus :)

I might have to look up the Mac version