Illustrated page of what an 16 bit can do..

[shoggoth]

save2600 wrote:
Kind of a neat site. Surprising to see all the different doo-dads for the STE and especially cool people out there still monkeying around with 'em. But boy... reminded me how ugly the GEM/Desktop is  ;-)  

Workbench 1.3 isn't exactly pretty either A modern Atari desktop look pretty ok, even though it's still a bit square-ish:
http://hem.passagen.se/shoggoth/stuff/snap_000.gif
http://hem.passagen.se/shoggoth/stuff/snap_001.gif

[shoggoth]

countzero wrote:
I thought TT30 was not 16 bit ? (TT meaning thirtytwo/thirtytwo ?)

also, workbench 1.3 is leagues ahead of what Gem has to offer ... come on guys ...

Nah, come on. Workbench 1.3 is cool in it's own right, but unless you're comparing it to an equally old version of GEM I'd say you're gravely mistaken, since the OS evolved quite a lot since those days. Or do you have any particular facts about this matter?

[shoggoth]

countzero wrote:
of course I'm comparing it to an equally old version of GEM.
erm how about multitasking for starters ?
annoying 8.3 filename limitation ?
no ram disk ? etc ...
but one should also keep in mind that kickstart 1.3 takes 256 Kb space in ROM and wb 1.3 is loaded on top of it from floppy.
while GEM is totally loaded from a 192 ? kb ROM if I'm not mistaken.
so it's no wonder workbench is much more feature rich from TOS/GEM combination.

Well then it's a fair comparison. My point was only that someone mentioned how ugly the old GEM desktop was, and I mentioned that it evolved quite a lot since those days. Then you made your post, giving the impression that you compared apples and oranges - which you now say you didn't so no worries :-)

[shoggoth]

save2600 wrote:
Yeah, that was me who said GEM was ugly. Latest TOS/GEM I ever ran was Rainbow (1.4) and it sucked. I have seen later pics of GEM, but don't you need the Falcon or TT's to run it? And starting with what version of TOS came a better looking GEM? IMO - the more modern looking GEM closely resembles the olden MacOS look. Square & blocky as you had mentioned.

Well, I guess it's like later incarnations of AmigaOS - the system requirements are slightly higher than a "stock" ST if you want a pleasant experience. I'm using 060 machines myself, but afaik it's fluid on TTs as well, and even less if running a less demanding screen mode (since these machines suffer from poor chipram bandwidth just like the Amiga).

BTW: I've only ever owned Atari ST computers for the blink of an eye before selling. Did they have any kind of CLI to speak of? AtariDos or something similar? Workbench 1.3 is spartan too. Crippled almost, from a functional desktop point of view. No wonder Dopus was as popular as it was. If it wasn't for the CLI, 1.3 would be highly aggravating to use! lol  

Bash?

Back in the days, I don't think there were any official CLIs, which is odd because the system was designed with such stuff in mind. There were lots free 3rd party CLIs, naturally.