Looking at the Atari Mega STE Owner's Manual
Looking at the Atari Mega STE Owner's Manual
Do you miss Owner's Manuals?
Yes, back in the day computers actually came with Owner’s Manuals. The Atari Mega STE manual is about 180 pages and covers many things that seem obvious today, but it does have some interesting tidbits.
My copy is not in great condition as it is well-worn with notes and highlights on some of the pages and a cracked binding.
The first page of chapter one highlights the feature of the Mega STE:
Your Atari MEGA STE computer system combines the latest microcomputer technology with an easily understood and simple-to-use working environment. MEGA STE computers come standard with the following:
• A 16 MHz 68000 processor
• A palette of 4,096 colors; three different video modes
• An 80-column display
• Two or four megabytes of RAM, depending on the model
• An optional 68881/2 floating point coprocessor for faster information processing
• A built-in double-sided floppy disk drive that stores up to 726,016 bytes of information
• A built-in hard disk drive
• Ports for adding: an additional floppy disk drive, ACS DMA) devices, a parallel device, serial devices, MIDI instruments, and stereo speakers
• A Local Area Network (LAN) interface
• A VMEbus for high speed asynchronous parallel data transfer
• A cache option for faster information processing
• The operating system, TOS, permanently installed in memory. TOS includes GEM, the powerful Graphics Environment Manager. GEM provides the visual representation of the computer's operations
• The Control Panel desk accessory contained on the built in hard disk drive and on the USA Language floppy startup disk
• A complete collection of hard disk utilities on the Atari Hard Disk Utilities disk
Later models of the Mega STE came with a 1.44MB floppy drive, but the one I have does have the 720K floppy so the text above is accurate for me. I do find it strange that the size is listed in bytes rather than kilobytes.
It notes there is a built-in hard disk drive, but my understanding is that some Mega STEs came without a built-in hard drive. It could be added later, of course.
I do also have the USA Language floppy startup disk and the Atari Hard Disk Utilities disk.
Tidbits
The manual notes that you can issue a warm boot by pressing Control-Alternate-Delete on the keyboard. It also says a cold boot can be done with Control-Alternate-Right Shift-Delete. Neither of these commands do anything on my Mega STE. I have TOS 2.06, but perhaps it is because I actually have a UK keyboard instead of a US keyboard?
Mega STE keyboards are rarer than hen’s teeth, so I’m just happy I have one at all.
Another tidbit is that the manual mentions you can use keyboard commands to move the mouse cursor around the screen. This often comes up in forums and FaceBook groups because people will often get an ST of some kind, but don’t have a working mouse.
You can hold down Alternate and use the arrow keys to move the cursor around the screen. Hold down Alternate and press Insert for a left click or Clr/Home for a right click.
There is much in the manual about how to work with windows, format disks and open files and programs. These are all things that most everyone intuitively understands today, but they had to be explained back then as this could have been their very first computer or they were coming from a computer where you had to type all the commands.
There is even a short section on “Bombs”. These were actual icons you would get on the screen when the STE hard crashed. It doesn’t say much more than this, but the number of bombs indicated the the of error that occurred not that it would be of any use to the average user.
Appendices
There are some useful pinout specifications in the appendix.
Someday it might be fun to try and connect the Mega STE to a Raspberry Pi using the GPIO and one of these ports (serial is most likely the best fit).
You can download a PDF version of the Mega STE Owners Manual below.
Here are some other Mega STE articles you might like:
The floppy capacity is most probably given in bytes rather than what was then called kilobytes (of 1024 bytes each) and is now called kibibytes to make it look larger.