** 1 page feature / 700 words ** Atari STe: 1989 - ???? ** ATARISTE.JPG here ** Newspapers maintain obituaries of the great and the good on an ongoing basis. They do not wait for the demise of the worthy, but keep articles up to date so that when the inevitable happens, the editor immediately has the copy to hand. As the Atari Computing editor is occasionally short of articles, I thought "Why wait for my trusty Atari to die. Submit the article for publication now...". Purchased on 18th December, 1989, just in time for Christmas, this was one of the first of the 1040STe's to be sold by Silica Shop. Yes it had the buggy TOS 1.60 and the suspect DMA chip, but it proved to be reliable. It cost ś598, with the SM124 monitor. It seemed cheap, compared with the two grand my sister paid for a 286 PC with 640k of memory. The first expansion of the system came in February 1991 with the purchase of C-Lab Notator software. It had taken over a year to save up the ś450 to buy this top of the range music software, but it was worth the wait. In 1993 we spent ś166 upgrading the memory to 4Mb. This led to fruitful experiments with RAM disks. Soon Papyrus and SpeedoGDOS were being run from a RAM disk that took a full four minutes to boot up. Scaleable fonts, image handling and spell checking had arrived! 1995 saw significant changes in the High family computing. My sister scrapped her first PC, and we treated the Atari to a hard disk, NVDI and TOS 2.06. Expenditure on Atari hardware had now risen to ś1022. The hard disk transformed the way the machine worked. Unfortunately the TOS upgrade killed off the original C-Lab Notator, but by then the upgrade path had lead to EMagic Logic v2. This kept the software up to date with the introduction of GM Midi and other musical goodies. Access to the internet came along, bringing the delights of HENSA and UMICH. These gold mines of quality software and resources lead to the regular dispatch of cheques to InterActive to register shareware. I am indebted to Joe for the quality of the support he provided, and the aggravation with dollars and deutschmarks he saved me. From 1996 onwards, the Atari took an increasing hammering from two daughters responding to the demands of GCSE and A-Level courses. It did not flinch! Obtaining a "free" SCSI two-speed CD-ROM in 1997 lead to the expenditure of ś205 at the April Atari show. This brought an 1.4Mb floppy drive, the hard drive and CD-ROM all into the neat (but difficult to fit) DeskTopper case. The AT Key interface pressed my sisters redundant PC keyboard back into action. Towards the end of the year, the Star 24-pin printer began to wear out and was replaced by an HP laser printer. The quality of the new printout at 600 dpi was a tremendous improvement. But the printer, with a 68030 internal processor running at 24MHz, spent far too long waiting for the Atari to calculate all those tiny dots. So in June of 1998, the TUS Veloce+ came to the rescue. This gave a three-fold improvement in speed and proved to be compatible with all my software, except one mono game - a version of Breakout that suddenly ran too fast! For the first time, the complex displays possible with EMagic Logic could actually keep up with the music! By the tenth anniversary of its purchase, total expenditure on software and computing hardware had reached ś2,500. The word processing and MIDI recording performance matched or even exceeded that available on current domestic PC's. The only area where the Atari could not keep up with the pace of technological change was the video display. The Atari STe was greeted with derision by the press because it did not play all the old STFM games. Yet it was a powerful piece of kit, crying out to be taken seriously. Sadly, software like Papyrus and Logic came five years too late to sustain it. To those who knew it, it was a reliable and trusty friend that cost less than ś5 a week to purchase and run. Michael High