I recently came across a photo of my original Atari Mega STE setup from 1993. I purchased this Mega STE in September 1992 and I kept it until early 1995 when I sold it to purchase my first PC.
I used my original Mega STE in college and while I was Current Notes ST editor. This photo is from the off-campus apartment I live in.
Does that just scream 90s or what? And that chair! Apparently I wasn’t worried about ergonomics as much as I am now! That desk was a Service Merchandise special that I had first bought for my 1040ST back in 1989. Hutches were all the rage back then. Although I gave the desk away in 1996, I still have the printer stand!
Let’s go through what we’re looking at here, to the best of my recollection.
On the far left is the printer. As I recall it was 24-pin and, rather unusually, serial instead of parallel. At the time I was in college and working part-time at Radio Shack. This printer had been used to print nightly reports, but was replaced with something nicer so they let me buy it cheap. Of course since most printers were parallel back then, it meant it didn’t always work with every program. I believe this was the Tandy DMP300 (#4 in the catalog page below).
I mostly used this for printing program listings and it worked great for that.
Below the printer are some printouts and a floppy storage container. I still have a lot of those kinds of floppy containers.
Moving to the right there is a monitor and some manuals to the left. Zooming in, I believe those are my Prospero Pascal manuals. The monitor is the Atari SC1224 RGB monitor. I bought this used from someone on the Delphi forum. It worked fine, but the cable was sensitive and the picture would go out if you wiggled it the wrong way so I got it cheap (sense a pattern?). Fortunately I never had to move it, so it worked fine for me.
This monitor was only used for games, which at that time would have primarily been Civilization, Populous and Llamatron.
On the floor beneath the monitor you can see a box that I believe is for STalker 3, the terminal program I used to create my Oracle shareware app for communicating with Delphi and GEnie.
Moving along, we get to the centerpiece of this setup, which is the Mega STE itself. I bought the Mega STE in 1992 so I had it about a year when this photo was taken. I had it upgraded to its maximum 4MB of RAM. It had an internal 105MB Quantum SCSI hard drive.
Sitting on top of the Mega STE is my Hayes 1200 smartmodem that I used to go online with Genie, Delphi and the school’s Unix systems (via VT-100 emulator). Next to that is a Monitor Master that allowed me to switch between the Atari SM124 monochrome monitor and the SC1224 RGB monitor without having to touch any cables.
Today I also own an SM124, SC1224 and Monitor Master, but I instead have a Dell LCD monitor hooked up to my Mega STE as it is more convenient and takes up much less space, at a cost of losing that retro CRT coolness.
Seeing the pocket watch on the Mega STE tells me this photo was taken was after October 1993. The pocket watch belonged to my Grandfather who passed in October 1993 and my Dad gave me that stopwatch shortly afterwards. I still have it.
Above the monitor is my flip calendar, which likely has the wrong date since I never remember to flip it. I actually still have that calendar as well and it also has the wrong date now.
To the right of the computer is a bit of a mess. There is a floppy holder, but I cannot make out the floppies that are in it. I had most stuff on the hard drive, so didn’t directly need floppies except for installation, backups and some games.
On the shelf below the desk are some books. I can easily make out a Calculus book and as I recall the book on the far left might be for databases.
It certainly would have been cool to have some more detailed pictures of this setup. I spent a lot of time sitting there and it warranted more photos, but unlike today, people didn’t take pictures of every little thing. After all, it was expensive to buy and develop film!
It’s easy to forget how few things were actually photographed in those days. Today you can take a picture of anything easily and cheaply. Back in the 80s, you needed to grab your camera, already have film, take a photo without even knowing how it might really look, take it somewhere to pay to get it developed once the roll of film was full, then go back to pay and pick up the pictures. It was quite a process! Casually snapping photos was really not a thing, especially not of most mundane things.
And for completeness, here is a picture of my current Mega STE config:
With this newly found old photo, I now have photos of the three main Atari computers I used back in the old days!
Atari 800XL setup circa 1986
My Dad’s Atari Mega ST2 setup circa 1995
The only other Atari I used was an Atari 400, but that was never set up at a desk. It was just connected to the TV and mostly used as a game console. I haven’t yet come across a photo of this.
