Data Becker was huge in Germany and Austria and you‘d see their rather simple white and red book covers in every computer store and every nerd‘s room. They‘d print books about almost every aspect, I do have one about the ST that came out before the machine was available at retail and basically just described the machine and showed a couple of screenshots, but had no programming info whatsoever. One of their 8-bit books (Atari 800XL PEEKS and POKES or so contained lots of undocumented addresses that the US Atari gurus had warned not to use years before.
Back in the day, I had two of the early Abacus books. Those together with the Megamax C manual got me to where I was developing, in C, final projects for grad school. Then after graduation, I had a unique set of constraints at my job: on PCs, be able to process interrupts with zero latency while also providing a GUI. Because Windows was non-deterministic with interrupts, I sat down with Microsoft C 6.0 for DOS and wrote a GUI from scratch -- mimicking somewhat the GEM API that I had grown so familiar with. Here is what it looked like: https://www.semitracks.com/reference-material/failure-and-yield-analysis/failure-analysis-package-level/figures/acoustic-microscopy-figure-9.gif
Wow, this takes me back! I learned how to code for the ST and use the basic GEM API calls as a 12 year old with these books.
I tried to get into 68K ML as well but only got so far before I just turned to Mark Williams C.
Ahhhh memories. These machines were so fun to build software for.
My MacBook Pro M1 Max Pro is ostensibly far more capable as a hardware platform, but it’s closed internals and OS and “need for authorized software” is actually a massive backslide from what we had with the open, accessible ST back in the olden days.
Data Becker was huge in Germany and Austria and you‘d see their rather simple white and red book covers in every computer store and every nerd‘s room. They‘d print books about almost every aspect, I do have one about the ST that came out before the machine was available at retail and basically just described the machine and showed a couple of screenshots, but had no programming info whatsoever. One of their 8-bit books (Atari 800XL PEEKS and POKES or so contained lots of undocumented addresses that the US Atari gurus had warned not to use years before.
Some of the Abacus books can be downloaded from https://archive.org/details/ataristmanuals
Back in the day, I had two of the early Abacus books. Those together with the Megamax C manual got me to where I was developing, in C, final projects for grad school. Then after graduation, I had a unique set of constraints at my job: on PCs, be able to process interrupts with zero latency while also providing a GUI. Because Windows was non-deterministic with interrupts, I sat down with Microsoft C 6.0 for DOS and wrote a GUI from scratch -- mimicking somewhat the GEM API that I had grown so familiar with. Here is what it looked like: https://www.semitracks.com/reference-material/failure-and-yield-analysis/failure-analysis-package-level/figures/acoustic-microscopy-figure-9.gif
Wow, this takes me back! I learned how to code for the ST and use the basic GEM API calls as a 12 year old with these books.
I tried to get into 68K ML as well but only got so far before I just turned to Mark Williams C.
Ahhhh memories. These machines were so fun to build software for.
My MacBook Pro M1 Max Pro is ostensibly far more capable as a hardware platform, but it’s closed internals and OS and “need for authorized software” is actually a massive backslide from what we had with the open, accessible ST back in the olden days.