I really loved my Falcon 030, which I primarily used for music production in the 90s.
I already had an 1040 ST(FM) before it, but the Falcon 030 was really nice because of it's integrated DSP and the faster 68030 of course. It allowed 8 track hard-disk recording integrated into MIDI sequencer at a price much lower than the alternatives like Macintosh Sound Tools / Pro Tools systems. You could even have some effects like reverb with the DSP (nowhere near todays quality of course, but good enough for demos).
Replying to my own comments because I missed the edit window...
I just remembered that the Falcon was actually my first personal system with Internet access and a web browser. The browser was called CAB, I think some incarnations still exist for macOS. And you had to use some additional software for the TCP/IP stack, because TOS didn't have one. I think I was using something called PPP Connect, which only really worked with CAB and related tools, and an alternative stack called STinG. Detailed memories are vague though.
Long time lurker here. Decided to create an account to respond.
I actually used to own a C-LAB Falcon Mk II for a few years before I sold it off after the great tech layoffs of 2023 just to make ends meet. It was a really neat system... almost something of an anachronism, considering C-LAB pumped these out well after Atari bailed on computers in exchange for putting all their eggs in the ill-fated Atari Jaguar basket.
To that end, I'm unduly impressed with the community around this computer. I've gotten more online help on the Falcon than I ever did on any other retro system I've owned in the past. The fanbase is clearly passionate. I even sent my C-LAB Falcon over to Centuriontech out in the Czech Republic, and he did an outstanding job on a capacitor replacement job I needed done. The multilayer PCB made working with some of the components a bit tricky, especially for a soldering iron novice like myself.
It's a real shame I had to sell it off, but bills needed to be paid, and I ended up making a profit on the sale, despite all the money I poured into repairs and cleanup of the system. Even with its dodgy software compatibility with older ST titles, it would have been cool to keep it in my collection for the long haul.
> By the end of the 80s, there were really only four major computer lines in the US. You had PCs (and their clones, of which there were many), Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. For a short while there was also NeXT, but even with its big promises, great innovations and charismatic leader it didn’t survive as a hardware platform.
I rather see NeXT as a competitor in the market for Unix Workstations (Sun, HP, SGI, ...) and not as a competitor to the four mentioned (consumer) lines.
It was targeted at Universities, as a foothold customer, since it ended up too expensive for even prosumers.
It ended up mostly finding uptake in custom apps in the Fortune 500 (and kept it toe-hold in universities) while it lasted as a hardware platform, and then in its OS only incarnation.
It certainly was. Also in the late 80s, Apple IIGS (a.k.a. Woz dream machine) was fairly successful on the US market, albeit obsolete and discontinued by the time the Falcon was introduced.
There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. Considering Apple users had to wait even longer (and less popular Acorn Archimedes / RiscOS is still struggling with "cooperative" MT, today), I think Commodore — or more accurately: the Amiga team — was way ahead of its time (also in terms of hardware) launching Amiga in 1985.
The funny thing is that the Amiga was actually developed by Atari engineers and the ST by commodore ones (ok I oversimplify the situation a little bit there but the history is really weird)
> There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier.
The thing is, that's only part of the story.
There's a generation of techies who are about 40 now who don't remember this stuff well, and some of the older ones have forgotten with time but don't realise. I had some greybeard angrily telling me that floppy drives were IDE recently. Senile idiot.
Anyway.
Preemptive multitasking is only part of the story. Lots of systems had it. Windows 2.0 could do preemptive multitasking -- but only of DOS apps, and only in the base 640kB of RAM, so it was pretty useless.
It sounds good but it's not. Because the other key ingredient is memory protection. You need both, together, to have a compelling deal. Amiga and Windows 2.x/3.x only had the preemption part, they had no hardware memory management or protection to go with it. (Windows 3.x when running on a 386 and also when given >2MB RAM could do some, for DOS apps, but not much.)
Having multiple pre-emptive tasks is relatively easy if they are all in the same memory space, but it's horribly horribly unstable.
Also see: microkernels. In size terms, AmigaOS was a microkernel, but a microkernel without memory protection is not such a big deal, because the hard part of a microkernel is the interprocess communication, and if they can just do that by reading and writing each other's RAM it's trivially easy but also trivially insecure and trivially unstable.
RISC OS had pre-emptive multitasking too... but only of text-only command-line windows, and there were few CLI RISC OS apps so it was mostly useless. At least on 16-bit Windows there were lots of DOS apps so it was vaguely useful, if they'd fit into memory. Which only trivial ones would. Windows 3 came along very late in the DOS era, and by then, most DOS apps didn't fit into memory on their own one at a time. I made good money optimising DOS memory around 1990-1992 because I was very good at it and without it most DOS apps didn't fit into 500-550kB any more. So two of them in 640kB? Forget it.
Preemption is clever. It lets apps that weren't designed to multitask do it.
But it's also slow. Which is why RISC OS didn't do it. Co-op is much quicker
which is also why OSes like RISC OS and 16-bit Windows chose it for their GUI apps: because GUI apps strained the resources of late-1980s/very-early-1990s computers. So you had 2 choices:
• The Mac and GEM way: don't multitask at all.
• The 16-bit Windows and RISC OS way: multitask cooperatively, and hope nothing goes wrong.
Later, notably, MacOS 7-8-9 and Falcon MultiTOS/MiNT/MagiC etc added coop multitasking to single-tasking GUI OSes. I used MacOS 8.x and 9.x a lot and I really liked them. They were extraordinarily usable to an extent Mac OS X has never and will never catch up with.
But the good thing about owning a Mac in the 1990s was that at least one thing in your life was guaranteed to go down on you every single day.
Some weeks ago I switched on my old Falcon030 for the first time since 1997. The operating system feels surprisingly modern and fast. If it weren't for the low screen resolution, you could almost mistake it for an up-to-date window manager like XFCE.
I used the TOS alternative MagiC with NVDI and an alternative desktop called Jinnee on my Falcon back then (when I wasn't using it for music production, those programs where usually incompatible with MagiC).
This made the system feel pretty much state of the art.
The Falcon was a nice machine (I still have one!) although it suffered from the characteristic Atari penny-pinching: still no MIDI thru port (on a machine which was otherwise amazing audio-wise - same DSP as the NeXT!) and while the new video modes were great, they used comparatively more RAM and were somewhat held back by the fact it still had a 16-bit data bus.
The OS didn't take anything like full advantage of the hardware, but any serious users at the time would have piled on extensions/addons/replacements like MagiC.
Massive penny pinching. The original design is here:
https://mikrosk.github.io/sparrow/falcon_specification_19920...
The 16bit bus limitation seems to stem from the RAM configurations - 2mb rather than 1mb would be the default config which cost more. As a result that kinda crippled the videl - only 16bit truecolour, lower clockspeeds on the CPU and videl, and slower ram access.
8 bit chunky mode was also planned, and a GPU - might have been the Jaguar TOM chip. I think MultiTos in ROM might have been planned at some point.
I never had any Atari computer back in the day, being born slightly after their heyday. But in about 2006 I became aware of the cool demoscene on these old computers and acquired a 1040 STFM and Amiga A500 to experience them properly and to play around with. And even though it was before my time there's just something special to me about the 16-bit era of computing. Computers had a sort of character to them back then.
I'd love to get a Falcon030 or an A1200 or something today but they're far more expensive nowadays than I think they're worth unfortunately, cool as they are. But I still have the STFM and A500 and I've upgraded/modded them as far as possible pretty much, and I do still turn them on from time to time.
As a sidenote, there is even an open-source recreation of the TOS operating system for the Atari 16/32 bit computers called EmuTOS that is in active development to this day. It just had a new release a few days ago: https://emutos.sourceforge.io/. And this new release happens to have better support for the Falcon video chip.
There was a time when the Atari ST was the perfect home computer. It was cheap, easy to use like the Mac, and offered a 'next gen' 16bit gaming experience before any of my friends had a Sega Genesis. I continued to be a diehard ST fan until the exact second I first saw Doom running on a PC.
When I was about 16 and considering spending my hard-earned money on my first computer, I was drooling over the Falcon. I wanted to make music, so the built-in MIDI ports on the Atari computers was very compelling. However... my best friend at the time was big into the Amiga so in the end I got an A1200 (and never regretted it). But I still drool when I see the Falcon!
I had a 1040stf back in the days, and waited for the falcon 030 to happen. Amiga, i386, etc happened - I eventually switched to pc before the falcon happened.
It sounds a bit cheesy , but I was much younger back then, and it felt like my team had let me down.
What’s interesting about the Atari ST (and successors) keyboard that I hadn’t noticed before is that the cursor keys are basically on the same height as the home row. This seems like it would me more ergonomic than the conventional placement at the bottom.
You are right, it was a bit more ergonomic. I remember taking some time to get used to the low cursor keys on PC keyboards way back when I inevitably had to stop using my ST and switch to a PC.
That said, the ST keyboards were notoriously squishy, lacking much in the way of tactile feedback. So many people didn't particularly enjoy them for touch-typing.
"So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term [..]"
To me this is not obvious at all, even in hindsight. There are lots of good points that support that argument, but I yet have to see one that is really compelling. Even if we combine all the little paper cuts together, while convincing, it is still far from pre-determining the future that came to be.
"Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Falcon’s hardware design was its case. In order to save money (apparently), Atari used the 1040ST one-piece case design."
I am an Amiga guy and I hate to say it, but the ST was the most handsome of the bunch.
Amiga was really well used in broadcasting for a long time, even when ST and Amiga where on their way out, at least until graphic cards in PCs became a thing.
You bought the Atari ST for music, and Amiga for graphics. I saw STs in music studios well into the 00s.
Is that a stylised version of the original Elite game there in the screenshot? It doesn't look like the real game. Strange. Maybe Atari wasn't allowed to use that in their marketing?
My progression was Atari 800XL, Atari 520STfm, then Atari Falcon 030 - then switched to a Linux PC in the late 90s. My parents most likely sold my old computers but a few years ago I reacquired an Atari 800XL for old time's sake.
[+] [-] steve1977|2 years ago|reply
I already had an 1040 ST(FM) before it, but the Falcon 030 was really nice because of it's integrated DSP and the faster 68030 of course. It allowed 8 track hard-disk recording integrated into MIDI sequencer at a price much lower than the alternatives like Macintosh Sound Tools / Pro Tools systems. You could even have some effects like reverb with the DSP (nowhere near todays quality of course, but good enough for demos).
Basically one of the first affordable real DAWs.
[+] [-] steve1977|2 years ago|reply
I just remembered that the Falcon was actually my first personal system with Internet access and a web browser. The browser was called CAB, I think some incarnations still exist for macOS. And you had to use some additional software for the TCP/IP stack, because TOS didn't have one. I think I was using something called PPP Connect, which only really worked with CAB and related tools, and an alternative stack called STinG. Detailed memories are vague though.
[+] [-] TheAmazingRace|2 years ago|reply
I actually used to own a C-LAB Falcon Mk II for a few years before I sold it off after the great tech layoffs of 2023 just to make ends meet. It was a really neat system... almost something of an anachronism, considering C-LAB pumped these out well after Atari bailed on computers in exchange for putting all their eggs in the ill-fated Atari Jaguar basket.
To that end, I'm unduly impressed with the community around this computer. I've gotten more online help on the Falcon than I ever did on any other retro system I've owned in the past. The fanbase is clearly passionate. I even sent my C-LAB Falcon over to Centuriontech out in the Czech Republic, and he did an outstanding job on a capacitor replacement job I needed done. The multilayer PCB made working with some of the components a bit tricky, especially for a soldering iron novice like myself.
It's a real shame I had to sell it off, but bills needed to be paid, and I ended up making a profit on the sale, despite all the money I poured into repairs and cleanup of the system. Even with its dodgy software compatibility with older ST titles, it would have been cool to keep it in my collection for the long haul.
[+] [-] user2342|2 years ago|reply
I rather see NeXT as a competitor in the market for Unix Workstations (Sun, HP, SGI, ...) and not as a competitor to the four mentioned (consumer) lines.
[+] [-] mrkstu|2 years ago|reply
It ended up mostly finding uptake in custom apps in the Fortune 500 (and kept it toe-hold in universities) while it lasted as a hardware platform, and then in its OS only incarnation.
[+] [-] guenthert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] repelsteeltje|2 years ago|reply
There is a footnote about Amiga offering preemptive multitasking 7 years earlier. Considering Apple users had to wait even longer (and less popular Acorn Archimedes / RiscOS is still struggling with "cooperative" MT, today), I think Commodore — or more accurately: the Amiga team — was way ahead of its time (also in terms of hardware) launching Amiga in 1985.
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallstepforman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lproven|2 years ago|reply
The thing is, that's only part of the story.
There's a generation of techies who are about 40 now who don't remember this stuff well, and some of the older ones have forgotten with time but don't realise. I had some greybeard angrily telling me that floppy drives were IDE recently. Senile idiot.
Anyway.
Preemptive multitasking is only part of the story. Lots of systems had it. Windows 2.0 could do preemptive multitasking -- but only of DOS apps, and only in the base 640kB of RAM, so it was pretty useless.
It sounds good but it's not. Because the other key ingredient is memory protection. You need both, together, to have a compelling deal. Amiga and Windows 2.x/3.x only had the preemption part, they had no hardware memory management or protection to go with it. (Windows 3.x when running on a 386 and also when given >2MB RAM could do some, for DOS apps, but not much.)
Having multiple pre-emptive tasks is relatively easy if they are all in the same memory space, but it's horribly horribly unstable.
Also see: microkernels. In size terms, AmigaOS was a microkernel, but a microkernel without memory protection is not such a big deal, because the hard part of a microkernel is the interprocess communication, and if they can just do that by reading and writing each other's RAM it's trivially easy but also trivially insecure and trivially unstable.
RISC OS had pre-emptive multitasking too... but only of text-only command-line windows, and there were few CLI RISC OS apps so it was mostly useless. At least on 16-bit Windows there were lots of DOS apps so it was vaguely useful, if they'd fit into memory. Which only trivial ones would. Windows 3 came along very late in the DOS era, and by then, most DOS apps didn't fit into memory on their own one at a time. I made good money optimising DOS memory around 1990-1992 because I was very good at it and without it most DOS apps didn't fit into 500-550kB any more. So two of them in 640kB? Forget it.
Preemption is clever. It lets apps that weren't designed to multitask do it.
But it's also slow. Which is why RISC OS didn't do it. Co-op is much quicker which is also why OSes like RISC OS and 16-bit Windows chose it for their GUI apps: because GUI apps strained the resources of late-1980s/very-early-1990s computers. So you had 2 choices:
• The Mac and GEM way: don't multitask at all.
• The 16-bit Windows and RISC OS way: multitask cooperatively, and hope nothing goes wrong.
Later, notably, MacOS 7-8-9 and Falcon MultiTOS/MiNT/MagiC etc added coop multitasking to single-tasking GUI OSes. I used MacOS 8.x and 9.x a lot and I really liked them. They were extraordinarily usable to an extent Mac OS X has never and will never catch up with.
But the good thing about owning a Mac in the 1990s was that at least one thing in your life was guaranteed to go down on you every single day.
[+] [-] crq-yml|2 years ago|reply
https://forums.atariage.com/topic/234077-quake-ii-engine-rew...
And here is the 030 (plus some aftermarket RAM) running Quake 1:
https://youtu.be/QFXSZlaQ1Wc?si=ZTt_N_nkJxENMETO
The onboard DSP definitely makes a huge difference to what it can do.
[+] [-] rob74|2 years ago|reply
Edit: found it - https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ct60-accelerator-upgr...
[+] [-] foft|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actionfromafar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snickerer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve1977|2 years ago|reply
This made the system feel pretty much state of the art.
https://www.atariuptodate.de/en/447/jinnee#img1
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
Writing letters, basic spreadsheets, homemade flyers, reading email,...
[+] [-] doop|2 years ago|reply
The OS didn't take anything like full advantage of the hardware, but any serious users at the time would have piled on extensions/addons/replacements like MagiC.
[+] [-] alexisread|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krs_|2 years ago|reply
I'd love to get a Falcon030 or an A1200 or something today but they're far more expensive nowadays than I think they're worth unfortunately, cool as they are. But I still have the STFM and A500 and I've upgraded/modded them as far as possible pretty much, and I do still turn them on from time to time.
[+] [-] nynyny7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 95014_refugee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parenthesis|2 years ago|reply
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/atari-falcon-030
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/cubase-audio-atari-f...
[+] [-] jsz0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Agingcoder|2 years ago|reply
It sounds a bit cheesy , but I was much younger back then, and it felt like my team had let me down.
Computer wars ! Sounds silly now.
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|2 years ago|reply
That said, the ST keyboards were notoriously squishy, lacking much in the way of tactile feedback. So many people didn't particularly enjoy them for touch-typing.
[+] [-] palmfacehn|2 years ago|reply
https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/cover.1669406380.git.geert...
[+] [-] weinzierl|2 years ago|reply
To me this is not obvious at all, even in hindsight. There are lots of good points that support that argument, but I yet have to see one that is really compelling. Even if we combine all the little paper cuts together, while convincing, it is still far from pre-determining the future that came to be.
"Perhaps the biggest disappointment of the Falcon’s hardware design was its case. In order to save money (apparently), Atari used the 1040ST one-piece case design."
I am an Amiga guy and I hate to say it, but the ST was the most handsome of the bunch.
[+] [-] prox|2 years ago|reply
You bought the Atari ST for music, and Amiga for graphics. I saw STs in music studios well into the 00s.
[+] [-] bhaak|2 years ago|reply
No way. The Amiga 3000 was the most handsome of them all. :)
[+] [-] wkat4242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elvis70|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sanity|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimlottc|2 years ago|reply
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0