Here is the "mother" of all Atari ST series machines, the 520 ST. First released in 1985 the computer was quite a sensation. It had a mouse controlled OS, unbelievable 512kb RAM, and more revolutionary stuff... I don't have the packaging anymore, what a shame.

And here is my comfy man-cave: Everything protected with dust covers. 520 ST, SC 1435, 2x SF 314, Golden Image optical mouse, Competition Pro joystick. Finding those SF 314 covers was a real pain, ebay.com ended up being the savior. Click on the picture to see a view with dust covers removed.

A little later the 1040 ST series was introduced. It had 1 megabyte RAM and a double sided floppy disk drive built in. [STF=ST w/Floppy] [STFM=ST w/Floppy and HF modulator]. I bought this machine back in 1990 for something like 500 €. Also on this picture is the Atari SM 146 monochrome monitor and all the packaging and manual stuffs that came along. I hope I didn't miss anything...

Here you can see the motherboard of a deceased 1040 STFM.

This big boy is an external hard drive! Called Atari Megafile, it existed with 30 or 60 megabytes of storage space. Prices were hilarious back in the day, but then most people did not really need a hard drive but were happy with floppy disks. The noise this unit made was horrible!

The Syncro Express was syncing both floppy drives connected to it and trying to duplicate floppies while bypassing the floppy controller of the ST. Worked for some heavily protected disks.

Happy Computers Discovery Cartridge was an interesting piece of kit and existed in several different configurations. For example it could image copy protected floppies, there was a Macintosh emulator option (in ROM), you could connect up to four floppy disk drives to it, etc...

In 1989 Atari introduced the STE [E=enhanced]. As a reaction to the Amiga computer range this machine had some additions especially for games such as 4096 color palette and Stereo DMA sound etc... the game industry sadly never really picked up with this machine, so it never managed to get the attention it would have deserved. Only very few games use the STE's advantages, again I can only say what a shame that is. On this photo you can also see the Atari SC 1435 stereo color monitor plus packaging and manual stuff that came with the 520 STE.

Here is the motherboard of a deceased Mega STE, a semi-professional machine that was really nice to work with in the old days. It had on-board SCSI, high density floppy disk, VME expansion slot, upgraded TOS (2.05 and later 2.06), 16 MHz clock speed, etc...

Here is all my Portfolio stuff: The machine itself with packaging and manual, the interface to connect it to an Atari or PC, the disk with the ST software, the carrying case for the memory-card, in the background is a little pouch not made by Atari and the packaging for the optional power supply. The Portfolio itself uses DOS as operating system. It has several very useful programs built into ROM (like an address-book that can dial phone numbers, a lotus compatible spreadsheet etc...) and saves data onto credit card sized memory cards. So is it an early laptop or more a palmtop or... an organizer?

And here is the top of the line professional machine from Atari, the TT 030! When introduced (in a decent configuration), it easily cost more than 5000 €, believe it or not. It had full SCSI, VME slot, 4 serial ports, LAN network, high density floppy disk, 32 MHz (really fast in 1991!), Motorola MC68030 processor plus MC68882 co-processor, a 19inch monitor that used 1280x960 pixel mode as standard resolution was also available, etc... I used this machine as my main computer until 2002, the first version of this website was handwritten on it with an ASCII editor and CAB (Crystal Atari Browser) from Application Systems Heidelberg. On this picture you can see an EIZO F57 CRT connected to it running a Mahjong game.

The black box you are seeing encases the ET4000 graphics card, there is an adapter board that goes into the VME slot, and two flatbed cables go into this box which has a VGA output. I had a different graphics card before that fit directly into the VME slot, but I guess all kinds of weird hardware exists :)

More weird hardware... this is the aix TT Fast-RAM card, which could add a maximum of 64 megabytes of TT-RAM to your machine. If I remember correctly those were a pair of PS2 modules.

Another dust covers protected set. Falcon 030 connected to a 21" EIZO F930 CRT. With this machine I use a Logitech mouse. Click on the picture to see a view with dust covers removed.

Closer look at The Falcon 030. I bought this machine in March 1993 in a standard configuration (4 MB RAM, 60 MB hard drive), it got upgraded a little lately: 14 MB RAM, new Dallas time keeper chip, new large internal hard drive - and it is desperately waiting to be used.