Atari Means Business with the Mega ST

Summary

Announced at CES in January 1987, the Mega ST was Atari’s first attempt at creating full-fledged workstation for professional users.There is some conflict as to whether these are called Mega STs or just Megas. I’ve seen both names used and even have seen labels with both names. I tend to use Mega ST as it is much clearer and sounds less like “Amiga”.By this point, the timeline for the ST was:It makes some sense that Atari would want to take the ST upmarket. Both the 520ST and 1040ST were largely mass-market product and sold with a thin profit margin. In order to continue to grow as a company, a product with a bigger profit margin was definitely needed.Unfortunately the Mega ST had some issues with both its design and its market timing that hurt its chances. Let’s look at the design first.The Mega ST takes the standard ST and puts it into a low-profile “pizza-box” case with an internal double-sided (720K) floppy drive and a detachable keyboard.The keyboard was actually rather nice with cherry key switches. Sadly it retained the rather large key sizes of the earlier ST models, making typos too easy. It also had the connection for the mouse and joystick under the keyboard, which kept things neat and tidy but was a major pain to connect in the first place. The low profile of the case also meant that the disk drive slot would bump into the keyboard if the two were close together.Overall, I’d say the keyboard is a solid B+ and it is a sought-after keyboard today for its reliability. This keyboard also works great with the Mega STE and I’d love to get my hands on one.Other case differences include a built-in fan and a built-in battery-backed clock that ran on simple AA batteries. The fan was probably not really needed, but it likely improved reliability.As far as technical specifications, the Mega ST did not have many advantages over a standard 1040ST. Its main improvement was that it had a blitter chip that could move data in memory around fast, which was great for graphi...