Atari ST

A line of 68000 family processor based personal computers introduced in 1985 by the Atari Corporation, they used the TOS operating system which is a version of GEMDOS with GEM running on top.

Porting issues
While the underlying CP/M system is not that dissimilar to the OS/2 CLI to make mapping and converting basic API and IO calls all that difficult, the problem is that the command line was hidden away on the TOS system so almost all Atari applications even if they were small utilities had a GUI user interface that can be quite time consuming to port, it may even in many cases be easier to recreate the UI on OS/2 from scratch using some sort of RAD and just port the basic program logic over and rewrite the GUI interfaces. The system does however have surprising amount of IBM PC/DOS compatible features under the bonnet, for instance the system defaults to a CP/M style floppy format but will read and write DOS formatted floppies.

Care has to be taken in regard to data structures however since the 680x0 processors in the Atari ST/TT/Falcon line of computer have an opposite byte ordering to an Intel style processor like OS/2 runs on top of, however development tools see the processor as a 32 bit device so bit sizes are less of a problem than when porting from DOS for instance.

LISP
The most common LISP implementations used on the Atari ST family were Cambridge Lisp which was ported to the system by Metacomco and sold at a bargain price but the freeware RefLisp and XLISP programs were also frequently used. The older XLISP implementations that can be found on Hobbes are very similar to the versions common on the ST and programs port easily to OS/2 if they are used. RefLisp and Cambridge lisp are both Standard Lisp implementations, CL has some extensions to the basic SL spec and there is currently no OS/2 implementation available that replicates them fully, however RefLisp actually compiles on OS/2 with only minor tweaks and it supports the same graphic modes that the ST implementation has so porting RefLisp programs over is a doodle if you compile your own version, but furthermore RefLisp has some of the same SL extensions that CL has so porting your CL programs should be easier than to some of the Common Lisp or Scheme implementations available currently.

Versions

 * Atari ST Development System
 * Had a surprisingly large production run for a "development system", main difference between it and the final Atari ST release is that the floppy drives are external. Came shipped with a bundle of Digital Research development tools.


 * Atari ST (1985)
 * Atari STM
 * Atari STFM
 * Atari STE
 * Atari Falcon
 * Atari TT
 * Atari Transputer Workstation (Atari TT plus a farm of Transputers)
 * Atari UNIX Workstation

Links

 * Phillip Robinson: The Atari ST1040: A Megabyte of Memory for $999 - A preview from BYTE Magazine vol.11, March 1986 page 84.

See also: Category:Atari ST Tools