[TomaszZielinski]

As a kid I had Atari 520ST(M) and GEM was like a… window to a magic world. It was so different from anything I had seen before (older Atari, ZX Spectrum, C64).

Funny thing is that it was also my window to Turbo Pascal, because there was a PC emulator (8086 on an 68000!). It run very slowly, but fast enough to be usable.

The contrast between the magic of GEM and the crude text mode of DOS was another thing I remember - I think it made DOS much more exciting than it was in reality :)

[joz1-k]

I would even say, that GEM itself saved the Atari ST platform from an instant failure. Apple Macintosh had an original Mac GUI, and the Commodore Amiga (developed by a former Atari team) was technically more advanced in many ways, even supporting a true preemptive multitasking. GEM on Atari ST offered a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price.

[lproven]

> a Macintosh-like UI experience for half the price

The original Macintosh was launched January 1984 for $2,495.

The original ST was launched June 1985 for $799.

In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

Tech was changing faster than now in those days, but even so, the ST was a radical machine. You got a lot for the money.

By September 1984 the 512kB "Fat Mac" was launched but it was more expensive: $3,195.

Yes, Commodore's contemporary Amiga was more impressive, with better graphics, better sound, better multitasking, but it was $1,285 the month after the ST. Also, a single-floppy 512kB Amiga was not much fun. (Like a single-floppy 128kB Mac!) As the ST's OS was in ROM, a single-floppy 512kB machine was actually quite usable. For both a Mac and an Amiga, you really wanted twin floppies, or better still, a hard disk.

[gedy]

> In other words, not half the price -- less than a third of the price. The marketing slogan was "Power without the price" and it was true.

I had friends later marveling I missed out on the Macintosh world of the 1980s, but the pricing was not even remotely an option! So dang expensive for a lower middle class kid.

[lproven]

Exactly so.

I own a Mac Plus, an Atari 1040ST and an Amiga 1200, but I didn't when they were new.

By 1989 I could just afford to buy myself a 2nd hand Acorn Archimedes A310, an 8MHz 32-bit RISC computer with a 20MB hard disk... but it nothing like it existed for any price in 1984 or 1985.

But I was still at school in 1984, and had to be happy with a 48K ZX Spectrum, a black-and-white portable TV as a display, and a single ZX Microdrive for 85kB of random-access storage.

One of the remarkable things about both the ST and the Amiga was that they had optional add-ons that contained Apple ROM chips, and with them, they could natively boot MacOS and thus run real Mac apps. Both machines' hardware capabilities comfortably exceeded the Mac's, so they could easily run Mac stuff and run it well.

Mac software was often fantastically expensive by Atari and Commodore prices, but even so, this was a very attractive option -- and even with the emulator, the result still cost substantially less than an actual Mac.

Of course, longer term, Apple's pricing means that Apple is alive and well and profitable, while Commodore and Atari collapsed decades ago.

[jhbadger]

The nickname of the machine was even "Jackintosh" (from Macintosh and Jack Tramiel, who had left Commodore and then bought Atari's computer division from Warner). At least with the 520ST they really positioned it as a cheap Mac equivilent even bundling it with a monochrome monitor

[thw_9a83c]

Considering its price, the Atari 520ST was a good machine. The most common PC of that era ran an 80286 CPU with MS-DOS. However, in the end, the Atari, Amiga, and Macintosh could not keep up with PC clones, which were innovating much faster. Apple just got lucky and survived to 1997 because of its loyal DTP user base. Then, Microsoft saved it because it didn't want to be perceived as a monopoly.

[cmrdporcupine]

At the time the Mac launched and for many years after Apple continued to bring in big coin from its Apple II series sales (which was very successful in schools), not the Macintosh. So it wasn't really DTP that was keeping it surviving, at least for the first few years. Obviously that changed by the late 80s.